Springtime in Seattle’s Pike Place Market means tasty foods and wide-eyed tourists, and Pepper’s Spice Shop is ready for the crowds. With flavorful combinations and a fresh approach, she’s sure to win over the public. Even better, she’s working with several local restaurants as their chief herb and spice supplier. Business is cooking, until one of Pepper’s potential clients, a young chef named Tamara Langston, is found dead, her life extinguished by the dangerously hot ghost chili—a spice Pepper carries in her shop.

Now stuck in the middle of a heated police investigation, Pepper must use all her senses to find out who wanted to keep Tamara’s new café from opening—before someone else gets burned…

Amazon/B&N

About the Author:

Leslie Budewitz blends her passion for food, great mysteries, and the Northwest in two light-hearted mystery series: the Spice Shop Mysteries, set in Seattle, and the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, set in northwest Montana.

Leslie is the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, won the 2013 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her guide for writers, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure, won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction.

A Montana native, Leslie graduated from Seattle University and Notre Dame Law School. After practicing in Seattle for several years—and shopping and eating her way through the Pike Place Market regularly—she returned to Montana, where she still practices law part-time. Killing people—on the page—is more fun.

A true believer in the power of writers helping other writers, Leslie is vice president of Sisters in Crime (SinC) and a founding member of the Guppies, the SinC chapter for new and unpublished writers. She is also a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Authors of the Flathead, and Montana Women Writers.

Leslie loves to cook, eat, hike, travel, garden, and paint—not necessarily in that order. She lives in northwest Montana with her husband, Don Beans, a singer-songwriter and doctor of natural medicine, and their Burmese cat, Ruff, a book cover model and an avid bird watcher.

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Review of Guilty as Cinnamon

Review (4.5 Stars): One of my favorite places to visit is the historic Seattle Pike Place Market and I absolutely love spending time with Pepper and her furry sidekick, Arf.  In this mystery,  Pepper is struggling to find permanent staff for her Spice shop and building her business until she finds one of her customers murdered from a ghost pepper that she happens to carry in her store.  Now, Pepper must help find the killer before another person is blamed for a crime they didn’t commit.

Guilty as Cinnamon is a fun exciting mystery that has the perfect recipe of charm to entice cozy readers.  This is the second book in the Spice Shop mystery series and I enjoy every story that Ms. Budewitz has put out to date.  These characters are likable and entertaining and the plot is full of twists and turns that will keep you guessing.  Can’t wait to read book number three which I hope will be out sometime next year.