Bread on Arrival

Kansas City restaurant owner Heaven Lee--and her creator, Temple--move from paperback (Death by Rhubarb, etc.) to hardcover in a thin mystery that sometimes spends more time on the technicalities of bread-baking than storytelling. Kansas City bakers and restaurant owners prepare for the arrival of the ARTOS convention, a gathering of bread bakers who promote natural breads and loathe assembly-line products. Heaven plans to attend the events with her daughter, soon to return to college, and her baker, Pauline. Tragedy strikes when General Irwin Mills, head of an experimental grain laboratory, falls to his death from a silo in front of hundreds of ARTOS members. A former attorney with a youthful boyfriend, Heaven gathers her resources to expose the cause of the general's death--and then a second ARTOS-related death occurs. Temple includes a variety of recipes from the heartland, in traditional culinary mystery fashion. But her humor is too often smothered by a thick dough of cooking digressions and stilted conversations. Her plotting is nimble enough, but her characterizations are weak, ultimately producing a mystery that, despite some heat, fails to rise. (Nov.)