Welcome to Torte, a friendly, small-town family bake shop where the oven is heating up as high as the body count...Jules Capshaw is still chewing over her husband Carlos's return to Ashland, Oregon. Could there be too many cooks in the kitchen? Whatever is stirring between those two will have to wait. Despite the Oregon Shakespeare Festival being dark for the winter, the bakeshop is bustling, the dough is rolling, and there's no rest for the weary...especially...

When a celebrity chef arrives in Louisiana to open a new restaurant, he dies in a boat crash, and the proprieter of a local retsaurant is a prime suspect.

After a customer is poisoned to death, Robbie Jordan, the owner of Pans 'N Pancakes, must serve up the real killer to save her business from the competition.

Leelee Satterfield's efforts to run a new restaurant with Peter are challenged by her unpredictable friends, a male dog named Roberta, and the return of Leelee's notorious ex-husband.

Caring for an injured friend, restaurateur Jane Lawless discovers that her friend has been harboring a secret fear about a tragic accident that occurred years earlier and involves a suspicious reporter.

"Snowflake, Vermont, is known for its skiing in winter-- and its soup all year round, thanks to Lucky Jamieson's 'By the Spoonful.' Autumn brings golden leaves, pumpkin rice soup, the annual Harvest Festival... and murder."--back cover.

Tells of the people who work or hang out at Jessie's Cafe, a broken-down waterfront dive from a bygone era. Jessie, age seventy-nine, inherited the cafe years before it became home to a remarkable and diverse family of characters.

"It's Indian summer in Santa Cruz and restaurateur Sally Solari decides an open-air painting class is the perfect way for her to learn more about Paul Gaugin, the inspiration for her family's newest restaurant. But the beauty of the Monterey Bay coastline is shattered when Sally's dog Buster sniffs out a corpse tangled up in kelp." --

Lucky Jamieson hosts a famous author and her exasperating entourage at By the Spoonful, and the evening is more than spoiled by a copycat homicide.

The residents of Hubbard, Ohio, desperate to attract tourists, create a gala event for the Statue of Libertys 230th birthday and Laurel Inwood and her aunt, the owners of an ethnic eatery, offer French food for the week until Sophies friend, a former French chef, is found murdered.