Arya Winters and the Deadly Cupcakes

A posh estate, lots of baking, walks through the woods--what could go wrong?

Arya Winters is your typical cozy heroine. She lives in a cottage in a small English village and bakes for a living--well, she specializes in macabre desserts. She has nosy neighbors, who she avoids ruthlessly due to her social anxiety. And she has a keen interest in all things sexy.

Arya isn’t one to take on residential gigs, but when she’s invited to bake her cakes for a two-week art retreat in the dead of winter on a large estate, she can hardly turn it down. It has the added advantage of helping her get away from her nosy neighbours.

Except Monk Hole is rife with secrets. Everywhere Arya turns, there are more people with problems, and they all want to talk to her. Could things get any worse? A corpse covered in her cupcakes might turn up perhaps. Or Branwell Beam, her ex, who seems to have a past she never knew about, might make an appearance - with a new girlfriend in tow. It’s all Arya can do to hold things together. But can she sort it all out before she loses all she holds dear?

AMITA MURRAY is a writer based in London, by way of Delhi and California. Her first novel, THE TROUBLE WITH ROSE came out from Harper Collins in 2019, and her short fiction has won the SI Leeds Literary Prize, and has appeared in Wasafiri, SAND Berlin, the Berkeley Fiction Review and others. She’s held writerly residencies with Leverhulme/University College London and Plymouth University/Literature Works, and has taught advanced fiction at the University of East Anglia and CityLit London. She was named runner-up for the 2022 CRIMEFEST scholarship for authors of color. Find her online @AmitaMurray and www.amitamurray.com.