In this holiday mystery, which flashes back to an earlier point in small-town baker Hannah Swensen's life, Hannah's father has recently passed away, and her mother, Delores, is inconsolable. To help bring Dolores out of her depression, Grandma Knudson requests Dolores' help with a project the re-creation of the famous Christmas Ball (including the celebrated Christmas Cake Parade) formerly held at the now-crumbling Albion Hotel. The re-creation is the ailing Essie Granger's dearest wish, and the residents of Lake Eden pull together to make it happen, largely because many remember the charming storytimes Essie provided for their children at the hotel. While working in the hotel, Hannah finds Essie's unfinished novel about a young woman running for her life in New York. Fiction and fact become intertwined at the Christmas Ball, and Hannah solves the long-ago mystery of the woman in Essie's story. While the solution will be readily apparent to many readers, fans of the series will appreciate the delicious-sounding recipes, the holiday frame, the familiar characters, and the backstory about how Hannah started her bakery, the Cookie Jar.--Sue O'Brien Copyright 2018 Booklist

Bestseller Fluke's diverting 23rd Hannah Swensen mystery (after Raspberry Danish Murder), an origin story, finds college student Hannah home in Lake Eden, Minn., with her grief-stricken mother, Delores, three weeks after the funeral of Hannah's father and Delores's husband, Lars. When several of Delores's women friends come up with a project that will cheer her up, Hannah is all for it. Lonely widow Essie Granger is in the hospital recovering from a fall, and the women decide to recreate the annual Christmas Ball that Essie always loved. In the course of their preparations, Hannah and Delores discover a set of notebooks in which Essie began a mystery novel, and they read a few pages from it each night, unaware that Essie's thrilling tale is based on real events and that everything is poised to come to a head the night of the ball. Series fans will enjoy learning how the Cookie Jar bakery came to be, but others should be aware that the mystery element is slight in an entry with a heavy focus on food descriptions and Hannah's recipes. Agent: Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Set in a time before the Cookie Jar bakery was Hannah Swensen's home away from home, this newest addition to the series could be thought as the first mystery Hannah ever solved. While dreaming of starting a business, Hannah is distracted by reading Essie Granger's old notebooks of original crime fiction. Could there be a real-life true crime hidden inside Essie's writings? Trademark recipes and family banter (or bickering) are sprinkled throughout this whodunit that Hannah helps piece together. VERDICT Longtime series fans will enjoy this glimpse into the past of their favorite characters and get a few new insights into established bonds. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Fluke takes her popular series way back in time, chronicling the start of Hannah Swensen's success as Lake Eden's premier purveyor of tasty treats.Delores Swensen is in a bad way after the death of her husband, Lars. She just picks at the meals her daughter, Hannah, prepares and hides in her room most of the day. To snap her out of her doldrums, her longtime friends Annie Winters and Grandma Knudson hatch a plot to entice Delores, who never met a party she couldn't plan, into helping frail old Essie Granger fulfill her dream of re-creating the Christmas Ball she and her husband, Alton, hosted each year at their Albion Hotel. Of course Delores recruits Hannah to bake the cakes for the famous Christmas Cake Parade. As she witnesses her daughter's kitchen skills, Delores develops a plan of her own to help Hannah, whose interest in grad school has fizzled along with her romance with assistant professor Bradford Ramsey, open her own bake shop. Fluke fans win a trifecta of treats. There's the origin story of Hannah's Cookie Jar. There are the complex and challenging preparations for the Cake Parade, complete with recipes for a bevy of Bundt cakes. And there's a mysterious manuscript Essie has written, which Hannah doles out to her pals more sparingly than her Cashew Butter Blossom cookies, leaving them all to ponder how much of the novel is based on Essie's own life.Fluke's prequel cleverly reinvigorates a series that had been somewhat stalled by her heroine's marriage (Wedding Cake Murder, 2016) and the subsequent disappearance of her groom (Raspberry Danish Murder, 2018). Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.