Amish Candy Shop Holidays, the novella collection for the Amish Candy Shop Mysteries is now available in ebook and print. The collection includes Criminally Cocoa, Botched Butterscotch, and Candy Cane Crime. As special holiday season treat, I am sharing a few pages of Criminally Cocoa, the first novella in the collection. Enjoy!
Chapter One
“Cut! Cut!” the director Raymond Reynolds yelled. He was a tall, loose-jointed man, who braided his hair into a ponytail at the back of his head. Before meeting him, I didn’t think I had ever seen a man with a braid before, and I couldn’t stop staring at it. In my community only little girls braided their hair, never grown women and certainly never menfolk.
Bailey King froze in place. She was halfway through giving instructions on how to weave a chocolate basket for a candy display. Bailey made tempering the chocolate and weaving it over the bottom of a bowl look easy. She held a strip of chocolate in her hand, and it fell on the top of the almost complete basket.
She was frozen like a doe I had seen once paralyzed by the headlights of my father’s buggy back in Holmes County. Not that we were anywhere close to the rural Ohio village at the moment. We were inside a New York City skyscraper standing on a television soundstage. It was a new world for me, being on a soundstage, also known as a set. I had heard it called both. I have learned so many new words since coming to the Big Apple, which is what Bailey’s friend Cass called the city when we first arrived at the airport. She said to me, “Charlotte Weaver, welcome to the Big Apple!” and I had no idea what she meant. My ears were still ringing and my legs were still be wobbling from being on my first airplane flight, and I thought she’d misspoken until I saw the same phrase all over the souvenirs in the airport gift shop.
Cass had made a big deal out of my coming to New York City because it was my very first time. Bailey lived here before moving to our little Amish village of Harvest. In Harvest, she was an outsider, or at least she was at first—now she fits into the village just fine. I don’t think I would ever fit into the big city, not in my plain dress, with my bright red hair wrapped up into a bun at the nape of my neck and covered with a white prayer cap, sensible black sneakers, and apron. Everywhere we went those first few days, I thought people stopped and stared, but after a week I stopped noticing. There were too many other wonderful things to see in the city, and I wanted to see all of it.
Copyright 2019 Amanda Flower. All rights reserved.
3 novellas in one!
CRIMINALLY COCOA
As if being in New York City for Easter isn’t exciting enough, Charlotte Weaver is helping her cousin, Bailey, on the set of her first cable TV show, Bailey’s Amish Sweets. Charlotte notices odd events intended to make Bailey look bad . . . and realizes her cousin has a dangerously jealous rival. Can she find out who—before someone’s sour grapes turn fatally bitter?
BOTCHED BUTTERSCOTCH
Mother’s Day is a sweet and busy time at the candy shop Bailey King runs with her Amish grandmother. This year, Bailey’s parents are visiting, and for Mother’s Day Tea at the local church, Bailey’s whipping up her mom’s favorite: butterscotch fudge. All’s going well, until a sticky-fingered thief makes off with the money raised for a local women’s support group. Can Bailey find the culprit before events boil over into disaster?
CANDY CANE CRIME
Thanks to her new cable TV show, Bailey’s shop has more orders than she can handle this Christmas. Fortunately, her beloved Cousin Charlotte is organizing the Candy Cane Exchange, pairing sweet notes with a peppermint treat. Charlotte is delighted to discover she may have a secret admirer…until she sees something underhanded going on beneath the merrymaking. Can she stop a local Grinch before the holiday, and her fledgling romance, are ruined?
Recipes Included!
Happy reading! ❤ Amanda
Amanda Flower-Sweet Cozy reads 