Triple Chocolate Cheesecake Murder

Bestseller Fluke’s padded 27th mystery featuring Lake Eden, Minn., baker Hannah Swensen (after 2020’s Christmas Cupcake Murder), with its 31 meticulously detailed recipes, including one for the mega-calorific cheesecake of the title, amounts to a cookbook with a slim slice of crime on the side. After Hannah’s sister, Andrea, has a shouting match with Richard Bascomb, the town’s bullying, misogynist mayor, Andrea returns later in the day to the mayor’s office with a peace offering, a large piece of triple chocolate cheesecake, only to find Bascomb’s bloody body. Despite Andrea, wife of the Winnetka County sheriff, not being taken seriously as a suspect, Hannah decides to get to the bottom of the mayor’s death. Her list of possible killers grows as she discovers that Bascomb has managed to offend almost everyone he has ever come in contact with, including his wife, city council members, and his various former lovers and their angry husbands. Hannah’s internal dialogues between her rational and her suspicious minds occupy far more space than the sleuthing. This one’s for established fans only. Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Mar.)