Murder with a Grated Alibi
(2025)(The second book in the Harvest Moon Diner Murder Mystery series)
A novel by Diana Beckett
Murder with a Grated Alibi
Harvest Moon Diner Murder Mysteries · Book 2
Late winter in Maple Ridge is cold, quiet, and one bill away from disaster. To keep the lights on at Harvest Moon Diner, Tessa Bloom agrees to host the town’s first ‘Maple Ridge Mac & Cheese Throwdown,’ complete with TV cameras, rival creameries, and a celebrity chef judge whose face is on half the cookbooks in her pantry.
Chef Nolan Pierce takes one bite of a contestant’s baked mac, smiles for the crowd, and dies on Tessa’s floor.
Again.
Every pan in the contest used Tessa’s house blend cheese. Every camera in the room caught Nolan''s last forkful. When the toxin is traced back to a single wheel from a beloved local creamery, the town does the math it wants to see. Harvest Moon is cursed, Tessa is trouble, and maybe Maple Ridge would be safer without her diner and her questions.
Tessa refuses to play the villain in someone else’s story.
With her cook Jade, teen videographer Logan, and stubborn dishwasher Mrs Donnelly at her side, Tessa starts pulling at every loose thread. There is the traditional creamery with spotless records that look a little too clean, the shiny corporate dairy circling the town’s future, a ruined restaurateur who lost everything after the victim’s brutal TV review, and a cheesemaker’s assistant whose fandom crossed the line from devotion into something darker.
Someone turned comfort food into a weapon and is hiding behind small-town gossip, forged safety reports, and a very convenient alibi. To save her diner and her corner of Maple Ridge, Tessa will have to walk back into the aging caves, dig into old inspections, and face the possibility that the same corrupt signature behind this death is the one that signed off on the fire that killed her uncle.
Harvest Moon survived one murder. Surviving a second might cost Tessa the only home she has left.
Genre: Mystery
Harvest Moon Diner Murder Mysteries · Book 2
Late winter in Maple Ridge is cold, quiet, and one bill away from disaster. To keep the lights on at Harvest Moon Diner, Tessa Bloom agrees to host the town’s first ‘Maple Ridge Mac & Cheese Throwdown,’ complete with TV cameras, rival creameries, and a celebrity chef judge whose face is on half the cookbooks in her pantry.
Chef Nolan Pierce takes one bite of a contestant’s baked mac, smiles for the crowd, and dies on Tessa’s floor.
Again.
Every pan in the contest used Tessa’s house blend cheese. Every camera in the room caught Nolan''s last forkful. When the toxin is traced back to a single wheel from a beloved local creamery, the town does the math it wants to see. Harvest Moon is cursed, Tessa is trouble, and maybe Maple Ridge would be safer without her diner and her questions.
Tessa refuses to play the villain in someone else’s story.
With her cook Jade, teen videographer Logan, and stubborn dishwasher Mrs Donnelly at her side, Tessa starts pulling at every loose thread. There is the traditional creamery with spotless records that look a little too clean, the shiny corporate dairy circling the town’s future, a ruined restaurateur who lost everything after the victim’s brutal TV review, and a cheesemaker’s assistant whose fandom crossed the line from devotion into something darker.
Someone turned comfort food into a weapon and is hiding behind small-town gossip, forged safety reports, and a very convenient alibi. To save her diner and her corner of Maple Ridge, Tessa will have to walk back into the aging caves, dig into old inspections, and face the possibility that the same corrupt signature behind this death is the one that signed off on the fire that killed her uncle.
Harvest Moon survived one murder. Surviving a second might cost Tessa the only home she has left.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Diana Beckett's Murder with a Grated Alibi