A chocolate shop. A dead critic. A village with secrets it hasn't finished keeping. When Hazel Quinn trades her high-powered legal career for a chocolate shop in the quiet New England village of Maplecroft, she expects her biggest challenge to be perfecting her ganache ratios. She doesn't expect a celebrated literary critic to collapse on her herringbone floor on the opening night of her first tasting event. Desmond Fray was difficult, brilliant, and apparently not without enemies. With her shop sealed as a crime scene and her reputation hanging in the balance, Hazel does what any former corporate lawyer instinctively does: she starts building a case. What she uncovers reaches back decades — a destroyed restaurant, a buried review, a manuscript that someone was desperate to silence — and points toward a killer hiding in plain sight behind a carefully constructed alibi and an even more carefully constructed grief. With her methodical mind, her chocolatier's attention to detail, and the reluctant help of a straight-talking local baker, a sharp young journalist, and a sheriff who is simultaneously exasperated and impressed, Hazel must untangle a web of professional betrayal and long-held secrets before the wrong person takes the blame. A Bittersweet Death is a warm, witty, and precisely plotted cozy mystery for readers who like their chocolate dark, their villages atmospheric, and their heroines formidably intelligent. Back Cover Blurb: Hazel Quinn traded boardrooms for bonbons when she opened Velvet Cocoa in the frost-kissed village of Maplecroft, Vermont. Her chocolate tasting nights are legendary—until celebrated food critic Desmond Fray clutches his throat mid-truffle and dies on her herringbone floor. The sheriff eyes Hazel's ganache. The village gossip machine cranks into overdrive. And someone very much wants the truth buried under a layer of dark chocolate. Armed with a lawyer's instincts and a confectioner's nose, Hazel must untangle a web of old grudges, buried secrets, and at least one spectacularly bad soufflé before her reputation—and her freedom—melts away entirely.