Melanie Cooper bakes cupcakes and stumbles over dead bodies. It’s a strange combination, but it happens. With her best friend and business partner Angie Harper, Mel owns Fairy Tale Cupcakes in Scottsdale, Arizona, where their baked confections are considered treats of the highest order. So it’s really not a surprise when their friend Rene asked them to make cupcakes for the opening of her new art installation, a massive glass sculpture that is being designed to hang over the canal.

Mel and Angie have known Rene and her husband Peter for years. Mel considered their loving marriage as a goal for her and her fiance Joe DeLaura, and she is very much looking forward to the big night when Rene’s art piece would be unveiled. But when Mel goes to visit Rene to check on the cupcake order, she is met with someone she doesn’t know.

Previously, Rene had always been friendly and gracious, but now she’s brittle and angry. Not only are her emotions unusually dark, Mel can’t help but notice that she had lost a lot of weight and now looks like little more than skin and bones. Mel is certain that her friend is under extreme stress to finish the installation, making sure everything is perfect, but she can’t help but worry that maybe something more is going on.

While Mel is trying to figure out what’s going on at the art gallery, she also has to deal with problems back at the bakery. Angie is inexplicably sick, and their baker Oz is slipping out for appointments in a nice suit and with a new haircut. And then, when Rene turns up dead, Mel finds herself in a mixture of grief, uncertainty, frustration, questions, and trouble.

Will Mel be able to figure out what’s happened at the art gallery in time to clear her friend’s name of the accusations of drug use, or will Mel herself end up under investigation simply for being too close to too many violent deaths? Also (and maybe more importantly), what exactly does a Root Beer Float Cupcake taste like, and why doesn’t a dozen of them come with the book when you buy it?!?

Pumpkin Spice Peril is the twelfth in the Cupcake Bakery Mystery series from Jenn McKinlay, just one short of a baker’s dozen. And it’s just as tasty as the first. A story of human behavior and the connections that hold us together, this cozy is a fun, relatable, interesting, complicated murder mystery that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Or running to the kitchen for yet another cupcake.

Pumpkin Spice Peril does include recipes for the Pumpkin Spice Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting, Coffee Mocha Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream, Root Beer Float Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting, and Passion Fruit Cupcakes with Passion Fruit Mousse and Vanilla Buttercream.

Basically, this cozy is as delicious as the cupcakes it describes often. Maybe too often. It’s a little dangerous that way.

Galleys for Pumpkin Spice Peril were provided by Berkley through Edelweiss, with many thanks.