King Cake Rules

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Whoever finds the baby buys the next cake. Somebody wants the whole bakery. For forty-one years, Fontenot's Bakery on Magazine Street has baked the official king cake of the Krewe of Mirabelle. Delphine Fontenot braids it the way her grandmother taught her at the age of seven: four strands, never three. Then Owen Mercer opens across the street. He is a burned-out Chicago pastry chef with his late grandmother's recipe box and a three-strand braid. On Twelfth Night, the blind tasting goes to him. That same morning, the krewe's captain calls in a debt on Delphine's bakery that her father swore was forgiven, and gives her until Ash Wednesday to pay. The forgiving letter is somewhere in the building. Her father hid it "under the lid," and she has opened every lid she owns. Somebody switches off her walk-in in the night. A page goes missing from the krewe's minute book. And when the float barn burns, Delphine and Owen are inside it. King Cake Rules is a warm, funny New Orleans romance: rivals to lovers across one street, a real mystery with a Carnival deadline, a grandmother who rigs the king cake baby, a pink costume nobody should have to wear in public, and an elderly parrot who knows a great deal more than he is saying. For readers who want: • Rivals to lovers, with flour on everything • A small-business mystery with a deadline and a paper trail • New Orleans at Carnival: parades, brass bands, king cake and Mardi Gras morning • A whole street of characters, including a parrot who tells tall men to go to hell • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A parent's death before the story begins; a fire.