PRAISE FOR THE FUDGE SHOP MYSTERY SERIES
Hot Fudge Frame-Up
“An action-filled tale with a very likable main character as the core ingredient. Not to mention some amazingly delicious recipes that will have all readers running to their kitchens. . . . Readers will ‘eat’ this particular tale up while also drooling over the fudge recipes in the back. The same can be said for DeSmet’s mysteries that can be said for actual fudge: There is no way you can consume just one.”
—Suspense Magazine
“I love culinary mysteries and this book seems to have everything. A deliciously lighthearted mystery, a love triangle with hot guys, and of course, yummy fudge . . . Hot Fudge Frame-Up is a delightfully decadent addition to the series and I’m looking forward to reading more about Ava and her adventures in Door County, Wisconsin, in the near future.”
—Books-n-Kisses
“With captivating characters and a suspenseful mystery, Hot Fudge Frame-Up was a thoroughly enjoyable read. I can’t wait to see what Christine DeSmet has in store for us next. In the meantime, with the mouthwatering recipes at the back of Hot Fudge Frame-Up, I will be eagerly heading into the kitchen with this book in hand to try them out.”
—Cozy Mystery Book Reviews
“Lucky Harbor, a fudge brown American water spaniel, plays a rather large and important role for a dog. And rightly so. Great reading for beach time.”
—BookLoons
“Tasty recipes are included in the sweet-themed mystery. The fun only escalates with the high jinks of the Oosterlings and their friends as they meddle in one another’s lives as only loved ones can.”
—Kings River Life Magazine
First-Degree Fudge
“Will tingle your sweet tooth at the first mention of Cinderella Pink Fudge, even if this pastel treat may be a murder weapon.”
—The Washington Post
“An action-filled story with a likable heroine and a fun setting. And, oh, that fudge! I’m swooning. I hope Ava Oosterling and her family and friends take me back to Door County, Wisconsin, for another nibble soon.”
—JoAnna Carl, national bestselling author of the Chocoholic Mysteries
“Christine DeSmet has whipped up a melt-in-your-mouth gem of a tale. One is definitely not going to be enough!”
—Hannah Reed, national bestselling author of Beewitched
“The first in a new series set in the ‘Cape Cod of the Midwest,’ First-Degree Fudge is a lighthearted confection that cozy mystery readers will devour.”
—Lucy Burdette, author of Death with All the Trimmings
“As palatable as a fresh pan of Belgian fudge, this debut will delight candy aficionados and mystery lovers with its fast pace, quirky cast, and twist after twist. A must read!”
—Liz Mugavero, author of A Biscuit, a Casket
“Will have readers drooling with its descriptions of heroine Ava Oosterling’s confections. Set in a small Wisconsin town on Lake Michigan, readers will enjoy the down-home atmosphere and quirky characters.”
—Debbie’s Book Bag
“Interesting characters enhance this mystery . . . plenty of romantic tension. The mystery evolves nicely with a few good twists and turns that lead to a surprising villain.”
—RT Book Reviews (4 stars)
ALSO BY CHRISTINE DESMET
The Fudge Shop Mysteries
First-Degree Fudge
Hot Fudge Frame-Up
OBSIDIAN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Copyright © Christine DeSmet, 2015
Excerpt from First-Degree Fudge © Christine DeSmet, 2013
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
ISBN 978-1-101-59452-0
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
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Contents
Praise
Also by CHRISTINE DESMET
Title page
Copyright page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Recipes
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Excerpt from FIRST-DEGREE FUDGE
To those who volunteer in small communities such as Namur, Wisconsin, where history is preserved, neighbors are cherished, and everybody attends the fall harvest festival.
Chapter 1
The royals were coming in two weeks to our tourist haven of Door County, Wisconsin—a thumb of land jutting into Lake Michigan called the “Cape Cod of the Midwest.”
The momentous event had put a panic in me, Ava Oosterling. It was why I was in an unused, stuffy church attic and heading to the basement with my two best friends, Pauline Mertens and Laura Rousseau. We were looking for a divinity fudge recipe.
Divinity fudge is a white meringue-style confection and an American invention, though this type of fluffy nougat candy can be traced to ancient Turkish Europe and back thousands of years BC, when Egyptians combined marshmallow root with honey. Local lore said that a Catholic nun may have served school children divinity fudge. She allegedly left the handwritten recipe inside the church that Pauline, Laura, and I were cleaning.
Finding and making this divine recipe would help improve my reputation. Immensely. Since returning to Fishers’ Harbor last spring, I had unintentionally combined my Belgian fudge making with helping our local sheriff solve two murders. I was determined to stay out of trouble and focus on fudge.
Nature was cooperating. Three hours ago I had been in my fudge shop, and everybody had been talking about how we’d be at our colorful best for Prince Arnaud Van Damme from Belgium and his mother, Princess Amand
ine. Today was the second Saturday in September. Door County’s famous maple trees overhanging ribbons of two-lane country roads bore leaves tipped in scarlet. The leaf-peeper tourists clogged our streets and roadside markets on weekends to snap up pumpkins, apples, grapes, and everything made from our county’s famous cherries.
I’d increased fudge production at Oosterlings’ Live Bait, Bobbers & Belgian Fudge & Beer. I’d also opened a small roadside market in the southern half of the county near my parents’ farm with the hope of catching more tourists coming to see the prince. My six copper kettles were constantly filled with fresh cream from my parents’ Holsteins, the world’s best chocolate from Belgium, and sugar. Favorite flavors flying off my shelves included maple, butterscotch, double-Belgian chocolate with walnuts, and pumpkin. But I couldn’t wait to serve the prince and princess my Fairy Tale line of fudges—cherry-vanilla Cinderella Pink Fudge and Rapunzel Raspberry Rapture Fudge.
This brouhaha over a prince could be blamed on my grandpa. Finding a divinity fudge recipe from the 1800s for the prince was Grandpa Gil’s idea. So was asking the royals to travel here to tour our famous Saint Mary of the Snows Church in Namur, Wisconsin. The tour would occur during our fall harvest festival, called a kermis. Last summer, Pauline’s boyfriend, John Schultz, had found an antique cup during a Lake Michigan diving expedition. The initials on the cup were AVD, which Grandpa thought might belong to Grandma Sophie’s ancestor Amandine Van Damme. Grandpa searched Sophie’s ancestry and found, lo and behold, that a few of her shirttail relatives were part of the current noble class in Namur, Belgium!
Our Namur—pronounced Nah-meur—was a wide spot in the road, a collection of a half dozen buildings amid farm fields about forty miles south of my fudge shop. It was within a stone’s throw of my parents’ farm near Namur’s neighboring village of Brussels. Some of our towns were named for places in Belgium because the southern half of Door County was settled by Belgian immigrants in the 1850s, including my ancestors.
We were all shocked that Grandpa had called up the royals on his cell phone as if they were mere contacts. He’d reached some assistant, of course, but it had turned out Prince Arnaud was eager to bring more tourists to his city of Namur. The prince had accepted Grandpa’s proposal to visit, to our shock. But the prince saw this as a tourism mission, which could benefit both Namurs.
Jubilation here over this development was tempered by my reputation. The fishermen and tourists coming in to buy fudge kept saying that “Things happen in threes.” One smiley-faced man asked, “Do ya think that prince is gonna take a powder? Ava, you stay away from him, ya hear?”
“Taking a powder” meant he’d die in yet another murder involving me and my fudge.
“I’m not superstitious,” I insisted. “I’m scientifically minded.”
Fudge making is about the exactness of heat and the precise crystallization stages of sugar. Depending on what type of fudge you’re making, that sugar has to bubble and get to the “soft-boil” stage temperature of two hundred thirty-eight degrees. Divinity fudge—what the prince had said he wanted to try—needs two hundred sixty degrees.
Truth be told, even my scientific side was on tenterhooks. Divinity fudge is notoriously hard to make; you can’t have a speck of humidity, or the egg white meringue will flop. And Door County is a peninsula surrounded by water and humid breezes. In addition, every time a climacteric event had been planned lately in my life, a body showed up, with my relatives wringing their hands over my involvement.
Ironically, this time my parents and grandparents wanted me involved.
Why? Because Prince Arnaud Van Damme was thirty-six (only four years older than me) and a bachelor who was going to inherit a castle.
My relatives weren’t hot about my current boyfriend, Dillon Rivers. They had their reasons. My mother still slipped at times and called Dillon “that bigamist.” A part of me couldn’t blame them for trying to distract me with a handsome prince.
Oddly enough, my grandma wasn’t enthused about her royal relatives traveling to Wisconsin. Ever since Grandpa contacted them a month ago, she’d been acting aloof about the visit, as if she didn’t want to own up to being related to them.
“Grandma, how come you never told me about them before?” I had asked her last week while she was making one of her famous cherry pies. We had been in her cabin on Duck Marsh Street in Fishers’ Harbor. I lived across the street.
“I guess I forgot. They’re so far back in my family tree they’re barely a twig.”
A twig? She forgot royalty! My scientific mind said something was amiss.
I asked her, “Are you mad at Grandpa for inviting them? Did he make up the story about the divinity fudge?” I had assumed he did all along. My search today in the church was merely to please him.
She’d heaved a big sigh as she pulled a fresh, steaming cherry pie from the oven. “He didn’t make up that story about the Virgin Mary.”
My overzealous, matchmaking grandfather, Gil Oosterling, told the royals the divinity fudge had allegedly been enjoyed by the Blessed Virgin Mother after she’d appeared in front of Sister Adele Brice in 1859 in the nearby woods.
The Blessed Mother?
Yes. That Mother.
Here? In Wisconsin?
Yes. It’s true. A bishop even sanctioned it as the only such sighting in the entire United States. In December 2010, the New York Times did a big article on it.
Grandpa said that Adele—from the Belgium province of Brabant, where Prince Arnaud was from, too—hid the original, handwritten recipe within the bricks of Saint Mary of the Snows to protect it from the fire dangers presented by wooden structures and stoves in the 1800s. Grandpa told the prince I would make Sister Adele’s divinity fudge recipe for dessert at the kermis, with the meal being served in the beautiful little church. Not only that, but Grandpa said we’d present the original recipe document to the royals. Grandpa had learned the prince wanted to build a museum in Namur that would highlight the history and culture of our sister communities. Housing a priceless recipe in the museum would be like the famous Shroud being kept in the church in Turin, Italy. Thousands of people would visit Belgium each year. Grandpa said the recipe would come back to us on a two-year cycle or some such thing, and thus, thousands might visit Door County, too.
The prince had suggested the divinity fudge I made could be part of a fund-raiser for the church, which was now used as the Belgian Heritage Center. Princess Amandine was enthralled, too. She called divinity fudge “heavenly candy, white and pure as the robes worn by the nun and Blessed Virgin Mary.”
Princess Amandine had told Grandpa that divinity fudge was a rare treat. She’d eaten it only once, and that was when she was a little girl. I’d attempted to make it once and given up because all I’d made was goo. Supposedly, there was something special about Sister Adele’s recipe that made it foolproof. I was intrigued by this, but Grandpa was obsessed. There was mention that Grandpa and I might receive some special governmental medal of honor for this divinity fudge recipe.
This royal visit had gotten out of hand quickly.
But I tried to keep a cool head. All the fuss came down to raising funds for the church. It lacked a steeple. It had crumbled long ago. Selling tickets to see a prince and eat fudge would give a proper home to the three white crosses perched precariously on the peaked roof.
Pauline, Laura, and I had volunteered to be on the church-cleaning committee, a handy excuse to spy in every nook. We had just finished going through the beastly hot, stuffy attic bedroom above the kitchen. The bedroom was about eight by ten feet. One small window in the slanted roof let in light. The room had been used by a traveling priest back in the 1860s before a rectory was built. After finding no divinity fudge recipe, we had hurried down the narrow stairs and back into the kitchen, panting.
Pauline glugged from her water bottle. She was red faced and sweating, her long brown-black braid frizzed from heat and humidity. “I’m done. This is stupid, you know.”
“We have to look in the basement yet,” I insisted. My long auburn ponytail had gone limp, sagging on the back of my hot neck.
Laura ran a hand up her sweaty forehead and through her blond bangs and bob. “We need a break before the basement. I like your grandfather, but this isn’t my idea of a fun way to spend a Saturday morning. Besides, I’ve got to go home yet and bake bread all afternoon.”
Laura ran the Luscious Ladle Bakery. She supplied fresh-baked goods to our five-star restaurants. I sold her mouthwatering cinnamon rolls with gooey icing dripping off them at Ava’s Autumn Harvest on Highway 57.
I waved a hand in the air, giving in, but only a little. “Take a break. I need to check on Grandma, anyway, out in the graveyard. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Then we head for the basement.”
Pauline said, “All we’ll find will be mummified mice and musty dust motes. At least I hope that’s all we find. Things happen in threes, you know.”
I hurried out without responding, though inside my head a voice reminded me that Pauline was always right.
* * *
Grandma Sophie was only a few yards east of the front doors, tidying what always appeared to visitors to be an odd graveyard. In a boxy space under a giant maple tree, about thirty headstones sat in rows within six inches of one another. A joke around here said the people were buried standing up. What really happened was that in 1970 the priest had moved the headstones from the graveyard located along the east side of the church, where the lawn spread between two maple trees and continued to the back of the church. Nobody had been buried there for at least a hundred years, by that time. The ground was resettling, and the stones were sinking or toppling. To save the lichen-etched stones from disappearing altogether, they were moved. Because the collection sat in front of a blacktopped parking lot next to the church, people mistakenly believed the priest paved over the old church graveyard. But it was a myth that cars parked atop Belgians at rest.
On her knees, squeezed in between the headstones, Grandma was fussing over the placement of potted yellow and orange mums.
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