Life is never uneventful for Willow Creek, Pennsylvania’s most celebrated amateur sleuth, Daisy Swanson, who is eagerly anticipating her impending backyard wedding to her beloved fiancé, Jonas Groft. In the meantime, she’s busy running her tea garden while helping sort out the personal lives of family and friends. In just two examples, her aunt Iris is caught between two boyfriends, and her son-in-law, Foster, is likely overworking himself to the detriment of his relationship with his wife and child.

Even as Daisy is applying her calm warmth to resolving these issues, she’s been invited to speak on a friend’s podcast, Hidden Spaces. Journalist Trevor Lundquist is intent on exploring and discussing the Willow Creek secrets that deserve greater attention and is happy to play up Daisy’s involvement in solving a number of recent murders. He’s also put up a tip line for people to anonymously report crimes that they may not feel comfortable going to the police with—to some modest success in deterring local vandalism.

When a tip-line caller tells them that one of the chests soon to be auctioned off from a storage unit holds the key to a 20-year-old murder, however, Daisy and Trevor are understandably a little skeptical. Still, they’re happy enough to bid on the various chests and examine them after they win the auction lots. None of the lots seem to contain the evidence they’re looking for, but when someone tries to break into Daisy’s garage to access the chests, it becomes clear that the call wasn’t merely a hoax.

Tragedy strikes soon after when 36-year-old Henry Kohler is found strangled to death after failing to return home from work one evening. The presence of a burner phone close to his body indicates that he was their anonymous caller. When Daisy finally unlocks the secret of the auctioned chest, she strongly suspects that Henry was killed due to a long-ago disappearance and murder. The harried Willow Creek police force wants to focus on who might have had beef with Henry in the here and now, leaving Daisy to investigate the past. Will her inquiries, alongside Trevor’s insistence of talking her skills up on his podcast, place her in mortal danger once more?

I love the thoughtful nature of this series, with Daisy, her family, and friends feeling like real people with fully realized lives. The way the murder mysteries are interwoven into their personal dramas feels entirely organic. While solving the murders clearly has greater immediate weight in the grand scheme of things, I do love how the emotional issues are dealt with care and compassion too.

There were three original recipes included in the back of this book. I absolutely had to try out the following, as I have a weakness for any variation on an egg salad.

Egg and Olive Salad

Ingredients

5 jumbo-sized hardboiled eggs

2 tablespoons mayonnaise (I use Hellmann’s Olive Oil Mayonnaise Dressing)

1 teaspoon mustard (I use French’s)

⅛ teaspoon salt

Pinch of pepper

5 chopped green olives without pimento (add more to taste)

Instructions

Shell, chop, and put eggs into a medium-sized bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and mix thoroughly.

This recipe makes 4 to 5 scoops of salad to serve on a bed of lettuce… or it will fill 4 to 5 sandwich rolls.

This is served as a sandwich filling in the book, which is how I chose to enjoy it as well, with potato bread. Since I’m all about saving time and effort, I also chose to use pre-hardboiled eggs, which always come out beautifully. In addition, I used a whole grain Dijon mustard instead of French’s. Between that and the olives, I was pretty impressed with the layers of flavor in this seemingly simple dish.

Perhaps ironically, given the directive to not use pimento, my co-parent and I both agreed that the egg salad would have benefited from a touch of paprika, as it tasted overall like a very delicious deviled egg sandwich. This recipe also makes for a generous amount that chills well in the refrigerator, though you’ll likely want to eat all of it within a day.

Next week, we head to the West Coast to solve the mystery of an unpopular figure’s death while baking up some curry buns. Do join me!

See also: Cooking the Books: Knitmare on Beech Street by Peggy Ehrhart