What the Dough Knows ^Featured

My grandmother has been dead three years. She still rearranges my spice rack.

Sixteen jars, shuffled overnight into one word: IKKE NÅ. Not yet.

I am Ingrid Halvorsen. I run the only Norwegian bakery in Berwick-upon-Tweed, I notice everything about the people who come through my door, and I say about a third of it.

I also see things. Never on command and never usefully: two seconds of image, arriving when my hands are in the dough, leaving the interpreting to me. On Tuesday I saw a clifftop, a figure at the edge, and then no figure. On Friday they found the solicitor Douglas Pratt at the bottom of the cliffs, and I had said nothing to anyone.

There is a forged signature in a dead man’s will. Two people in this town needed Douglas quiet. And the detective sergeant has stopped pretending he comes in for the rye bread.

I cannot hand a policeman a vision. I can only bake, and watch, and get there before whoever did it works out how much I have noticed.

The jars have a new word this morning. SKYLD. Guilt.

A cozy mystery with no explicit content. Contains a death, grief, and the financial exploitation of a vulnerable older man. Low peril, no on-page violence.