A Recipe for Checkmate

A blizzard, a chess conspiracy, two murders, and an outsider baker who reads people the way she reads recipes: carefully, completely, and always looking for what’s missing.

The storm came in fast on the second evening of the Bald Mountain Lodge chess invitational, and by the time the wind reached the ridge, it had made the decision for everyone: no one was going anywhere.
Jean Hudson, the lodge’s new baker, had been planning to stay regardless. The job was a stopgap, one more chapter in the ongoing project of a woman who had recently lost everything and was attempting to rebuild from the most basic ingredients. She had flour on her hands, a small room on the service wing, and no investment in the tournament drama unfolding at the far end of the building. The chess players were polished, intense, and utterly absorbed in their own private game.
Jean was fine with that. She didn’t need to know their stories.
Before the third round, Riley McHenry, the fifteen-year-old prodigy who had everyone talking, disappeared from his room in the night. Then Arthur Finch, a veteran player with a complicated relationship with the lodge’s finances, was found dead in the east corridor. And Jean found herself doing what she had always done in her bakery, in her marriage, in every situation where the surface didn’t match what was underneath: paying attention.
The people sealed inside Bald Mountain Lodge with her are not simply stranded strangers. They are the pieces in a game that has been running for years: a chess coach with blood on his hands; a lodge manager with gambling debts and misplaced loyalties; a fierce retired professor protecting a grandson she can no longer save; a young woman carrying her mother’s wooden pawn as the only inheritance left to her. The conspiracy Jean unravels is elegant, old, and very cold. The moves were made long before the storm arrived. Jean is walking into the endgame.
She doesn’t know chess. She knows something more useful: she knows how to find what’s missing.
A Recipe for Checkmate is the first novel in the Jeanine Hudson Mystery series: a cozy mystery with real teeth, set in the snowbound isolation of the Colorado Rockies.