Sue Latham

Hannah’s up to her ears with Easter orders rushing in at The Cookie Jar, plus a festive meal to prepare for a dinner party at her mother’s penthouse. But everything comes crashing to a halt when Hannah receives a panicked call from her sister Andrea - Mayor Richard Bascomb has been murdered...and Andrea is the prime suspect. Even with his reputation for being a bully, Mayor Bascomb - or “Ricky Ticky”, as Hannah’s mother likes to call him - had been unusually testy in the days leading up to his death, leaving Hannah to wonder if he knew he was in danger.

When Hannah learns that her sister Michelle's boyfriend, Detective Lonnie Murphy, is the prime suspect in a murder case, she goes straight from a movie studio sound stage to the Los Angeles airport. Back in frigid Minnesota, she discovers that proving Lonnie's innocence will be harder than figuring out what went wrong with a recipe. Lonnie remembers only parts of the night he went out to a local bar and ended up driving a very impaired woman home.

Arriving home from a fund-raising dinner, senior Illinois senator Lyle Simmons discovers his wife's brutally bludgeoned body. And like any savvy politician with presidential aspirations, his first move is to phone his attorney. In this case, it's his old friend and college roommate, former DA Philip Rotondi, who gamely agrees to step out of quiet retirement and into the thick of a D.C.-style political, criminal, and public relations maelstrom from which no one will escape unscathed.

First a shooting, then a grisly discovery on the common.... Police partners, D.I. Calladine and D.S. Ruth Bayliss race against time to track down a killer before the whole area erupts in violence. Their boss thinks it's all down to drug lord Ray Fallon, but Calladine's instincts say something far nastier is happening on the Hobfield housing estate. Can this duo track down the murderer before anyone else dies and before the press publicise the gruesome crimes?