Murder at the Founders Fair: A Small-Town Bakery Cozy Mystery with Forged Deeds and a Dead Historian

About Murder at the Founders Fair: A Small-Town Bakery Cozy Mystery with Forged Deeds and a Dead Historian

A fresh start. A historic town festival. A murder hidden in plain sight.

Former title-fraud reviewer Delia Hart came to Bramble Cross, Virginia, to open her late aunt’s courthouse-side bake shop, Proof & Pastry, not to get dragged into another paper trail of lies. But on the eve of the town’s Founders Fair, Delia finds a fake eviction notice nailed to her bakery door. By nightfall, the fair’s beloved local historian is dead after a dramatic records-exhibit collapse, and a disputed deed linked to Delia’s new shop has vanished.

Now the gossip is spreading faster than pie dough on a hot counter. With opening-week sales on the line and her reputation already cracking, Delia has no choice but to do what she does best: follow the paperwork. Between rival bakers, preservation board politics, feuding families, and a polished town elite desperate to keep the festival “clean,” Delia uncovers forged documents, staged evidence, and a motive far more dangerous than small-town grudges.

With help from her glamorous best friend Frankie, her sharp-eyed teen assistant Kit, and one stubborn detective who keeps warning her to back off, Delia must prove what really happened before she loses her bakery and becomes the next convenient story Bramble Cross tells itself.