A missing heirloom. A locked cabinet. A trusted employee who isn't who she seems.

When a wealthy innkeeper travels to Maple Hollow asking for discreet help recovering a stolen family heirloom, Clara Whiskerton and Detective Sam Ellery find themselves ninety minutes from home at Thornbury Hall — a historic inn where a Georgian silver cream service has vanished from a locked cabinet with no sign of forced entry. What looks like a single theft unravels fast: a "professional appraiser" with fabricated credentials, several family heirlooms secretly swapped for convincing reproductions, and a devoted employee of twenty years harboring secrets desperate enough to kill for.

When the inn's longtime caretaker is murdered just hours after telling Clara he's close to the truth, the case becomes personal — and dangerous. With warnings left outside her own bedroom door and a sophisticated cross-border criminal network hiding behind decades of trusted loyalty, Clara has to untangle who's telling the truth before the killer strikes again.

The Cream of the Crime is Book 6 in the Maple Hollow Mysteries, a clean, cozy series full of small-town charm, a lovable tabby cat, and a murder to solve before the coffee gets cold.