Sugar in the Snow

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He never smiles. She never stops. And somebody is rigging the most famous Christmas competition in Paris. Maisie Kettering quit her accounting job in Ohio, spent her savings, and wrote to forty-three Paris pâtisseries asking to be an apprentice for six months. One answered. Three lines. If you are late you may not come. Mathis Berthelot is the grumpiest pastry chef in the Marais. He throws her croissants in the trash on the first morning. He has not smiled since his grandfather died and the green notebook holding the family's recipes vanished on the day of the funeral, taking with it the secret of the famous Bûche des Neiges, whose snow crackles like a winter morning when the knife goes in. His rent is about to triple. His only hope is a televised Christmas competition. And the only creature in the shop who likes Maisie on sight is his dachshund, who wears a Santa hat from Advent to Epiphany and bites anybody who tries to take it off. Then someone puts salt in their sugar. Someone pulls the plug on their blast chiller on live television. And the judges' scores do not add up, which is a problem for somebody, because Maisie has never met a set of numbers she could not read. Sugar in the Snow is a grumpy-sunshine Christmas romance with a real mystery: a bûche collapse on live TV rescued in fourteen minutes, a grocery bill from 1971, snow falling on the Seine, and a dog who knows exactly who belongs in his kitchen. For readers who want: • A grump who melts slowly, and has to earn her back • A heroine whose superpower is spreadsheets • Paris at Christmas, from a bakery kitchen at four in the morning • A lost family recipe and a competition that is rigged • A dachshund in a Santa hat A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language.