Rhoda's Recipe

A recipe card that vanished one Christmas in 2004 has just come back to the library inside a cookbook.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Margaret Hale finds an index card tucked into a cookbook from the Millbrook Free Library book drop. It holds Edna Zerbe's famous whoopie pie recipe in Edna's own hand. On the back she wrote four words: Rhoda's own. Teach Dot.

Everybody in Millbrook knows what happened to that card. While Rhoda Hollenbach lay in the hospital, her little sister Dot walked into the Fleetwood fire hall with their mother's recipe and took the blue ribbon. The sisters have not spoken since. They sit on opposite sides of Trinity Lutheran, and their husbands fished together every Saturday for thirty years without once saying either wife's name in the boat.

With the fire hall's Christmas baking contest coming, Margaret enlists Frank Dombrowski, who still swears he only comes in for the newspaper, and Susie Shah, who is supposed to be choosing a college. But Margaret is carrying a mystery of her own. Someone with a key let themselves into the library on a wedding night and left her the very picture book she borrowed at six years old, and there is a blue envelope in her handbag she has been afraid to open.

Before the ribbons are pinned, Margaret will learn why one sister has been hiding a recipe in a library book every Christmas since 2004, and why the library itself has been keeping a secret since 1964.

Rhoda's Recipe is the second book in The Lost and Found Library Mysteries, a gentle small town series about the things people leave behind and the neighbors who help bring them home. It stands on its own, and readers who met Margaret in Rose's Ring will be glad to be back in Millbrook for Christmas. No murders. More pie.