Murder Comes with the Special (The Blue Plate Diner Mystery Series Book 1)

The pie is famous, the neon still works, and the storeroom was locked when she opened it.Dinah Merritt pours coffee across the same thirty-one inches of maple her grandfather set down in 1948. The Blue Plate is a chrome-and-turquoise diner on the old Route 66 alignment in Juniper Wells, Arizona — population 1,590, elevation 6,100 feet — and it is the only place to get a hot meal for forty miles in either direction. Dinah knows which stool belongs to whom, which booth gets the heat vent, and which of her regulars will tell her the whole story if she just sets a plate down and doesn't ask. She has a ninety-pound Newfoundland mix named Gravy who owns a square of the screened dog porch, a grill cook named Harlan who has answered every question in thirty-nine years with the same syllable, and six stone cabins up the road with turquoise doors she is slowly trying to fill.Then a Phoenix property investor who has spent eleven days making enemies on Front Street turns up dead in her storeroom — behind a door she locked herself the night before and unlocked herself at four fifty-two in the morning. The new police chief is fair, thorough, and brand new to a county that runs entirely on handshakes, and Dinah is the one person who can tell him what forty years of handshakes look like from behind a counter. Between the breakfast rush and a stack of paperwork nobody in this town ever bothered to file, she starts noticing the small wrong things: a smell that shouldn't be in a storeroom, a mop head on a fence, a key that ought not to exist. She'd rather be making pie. But somebody used her building, and out here, that is personal.