The Smell of Burnt Scones A Chapter & Chai Mystery

In Ravensford, the coffee is hot, the scones are burnt, and the secrets are deadly.

Maya Patel came back to her hometown for a quieter life: a small café, decent chai, and zero corporate nonsense. Instead, she gets Chapter & Chai, a slightly chaotic bookish café in the town square... and a dead body in the town hall.

When pushy property developer Charles Langford turns up murdered just hours after trying to strong-arm Maya into "co-operating" with his plans, she finds herself upgraded from new girl on the high street to convenient suspect. The police want answers, the town wants gossip, and someone wants her to stop asking questions-badly enough to shove threats under her door and break into her café.

But Maya has spent years dealing with bullies in better suits than Charles Langford. With the help of her chaos-gremlin cousin Leena and Arthur Bennett, a retired local journalist who knows where all Ravensford's bodies are metaphorically buried, she starts pulling at threads.

In a town where everyone owes someone a favour and nobody ever really forgets a grudge, finding a killer might be the easy part. Staying on the right side of the gossip, the law, and whoever is watching her every move? That's trickier.

The Smell of Burnt Scones is the first in the Chapter & Chai Mysteries-a cosy crime series perfect for fans of small-town secrets, sharp humour, and amateur sleuths who refuse to sit quietly and behave.