Weekly Notebook: Someone’s Been in Jenna’s Kitchen
🍵 The Maple Grove Update
It started, as most things in Maple Grove do, with someone having a perfectly reasonable idea that immediately became a situation.
Jenna offered to host Easter egg decorating. She said this out loud, to multiple people, without a single contingency plan. Within forty minutes, her kitchen contained: six opinionated women, four competing egg-dyeing methods, one large bowl of rice inexplicably dyed magenta, and a six-year-old in latex gloves who had taken full creative control of twelve eggs and a can of shaving cream.
Lisa had, naturally, predicted the shaving cream. "I had a feeling," she said, from a safe distance near the back door. Mildred arrived, surveyed the scene, and immediately began reorganizing the dye stations in a way that "made tactical sense." Jenna's kitchen looked, by the end of it, like a tie-dyed glitter bomb had made a very committed decision. Joe, who had been summoned by a friend's emergency approximately eight minutes after the decorating began, was unavailable for comment. Jenna strongly suspects he knew.
When the eggs were done — each one a small masterpiece of chaotic color and absolutely zero coordination — they were beautiful. Obviously. The kids went outside. The adults looked at the kitchen. Someone put on a kettle. The coffee handled the rest.
📜The Weekly Tasting Menu
Fellow sleuths, I've been reading, and I have recommendations. Consider this your Easter weekend TBR — these authors are writing exactly our kind of trouble.
🔍 This Week's Guest Sleuth Spotlights
🐣 Death at the Easter Egg Scramble — Bessie Barr This one showed up at exactly the right time in my life (see: above, re: glitter). Bessie Barr is one of my personal favorites, and this Easter-set mystery has all the cozy chaos you'd expect from the season, plus a mystery sharp enough to keep you up past the candy coma. If you haven't found Bessie yet, fix that immediately. 👉 Grab it here →
🏇 Fencing and Foul Play — Nina Hunt The title alone had me. Nina Hunt delivers the kind of mystery where the setting does half the storytelling — and Fencing and Foul Play uses every inch of it. Bring snacks. 👉 Grab it here →
🌙 Murder She Whispered — DT Rose Atmospheric, clever, and the kind of book that makes you suspicious of your own neighbors in the best possible way. DT Rose has a gift for quiet dread dressed up in cozy clothes. 👉 Grab it here →
⭐ A Five Star Murder — LB Dayton High-end setting. High-stakes mystery. LB Dayton earns every star in the title. This one's for when you want your cozy mystery to feel just a little bit glamorous. 👉 Grab it here →
🐰 Murder on the Bunny Slope — Gemma Harper Ski lodge + Easter + someone very inconveniently dead = exactly my kind of vacation read. Gemma Harper's series keeps getting better, and this one is a great entry point if you haven't started yet. 👉 Grab it here →
🧁 The Main Course
Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints — Launching in 15 Days
Before Jenna McGregor had a coffee shop, a Jeep, and a habit of finding trouble in Maple Grove — she was seventeen, sitting in a high school bleacher that definitely shouldn't have been doing what it was doing.
Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints is the story I've been wanting to tell since the series began. It's the origin. The first mystery. The moment where a younger Jenna, a ragtag group of Maple Grove High classmates, and a very suspicious set of circumstances conspire to create the sleuth you've come to know across four books.
Writing it was genuinely one of my favorite things I've done in this series. Getting to go back to before — before the coffee shop, before the gang fully formed, before Jenna quite knew what she was capable of — felt like finding something I didn't know I'd been missing. I hope you feel the same way reading it.
It launches April 18th, and it's currently $0.99 in pre-order. That price doesn't stick around.
👉 Pre-order Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints now →
✍️ Behind the Scenes
With Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints launching in fifteen days, I've developed a coping strategy: stress-baking lavender scones and calling it recipe testing, which is both accurate and a convenient excuse. Charlie — my rather large, extremely opinionated cat — has taken it upon herself to sample anything left unattended on the cooling rack. I'm choosing to interpret this as a rave review.
If you'd like to try the recipe for yourself, it's straight from Jenna's kitchen — click the recipe drop-down in the header for this one and a growing collection of gluten-free favorites. No shaving cream required.
Until next week, fellow sleuths —
Willow 🌿
Meet Willow
Author, School Board member, and gluten-free baker. I write the Jenna McGregor mysteries from my home in Michigan, fueled by coffee and Peloton PRs.
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