“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” is the opening line of Game of Scones by Mary Lee Ashford. The folksy wisdom is delivered by the main character, Sugar Calloway, quoting her Aunt Cricket (who is actually quoting Harry Truman, but that’s another story). Sugar has recently moved from Georgia to St. Ignatius, a small town in Iowa. She has teamed up with a local “best-in-county” cook named Dixie Spicer to form Sugar and Spice Publishing. Their company publishes community cookbooks and apparently solves a murder or two on the side.

Game of Scones is the tale of their first project: a commemorative cookbook for the St. Ignatius Founders Day celebration. The project sounds simple enough until you factor in a mixture of small-town characters, strong personalities, underlying conflicts, and secret histories.

I enjoyed the quirky characters, the descriptions of small-town life in Iowa, and even the fantasy of starting over in a new place with new friends, a new community, and a new business.

In the opening chapter, Sugar finds herself in the middle of a fight between two of the feistiest committee members over whose scone recipe to include in the book. By the end of the fourth chapter, one of those committee members is dead and the other is missing. It is a compelling set-up for a murder mystery, but the story is really much more about the quirky characters, their daily life, the problems one encounters while trying to get a community cookbook to press, and coffee; lots of coffee. We hear Sugar’s descriptions, observations, and thoughts about her new home told to us in the first person as she attempts to get to know her community and the people in it. There are pets, grouchy neighbors, a budding romance (maybe two), a new business to get off the ground, some random vandalism, and more food than anyone could eat.

Sugar is pulled into the murder mystery because she is the person who finds the dead body of the committee member, and because it was her partner Dixie’s aunt who disappeared. Weirdly, the aunt reappears after a few days and refuses to say where she has been. No mystery explained or solved there. And there are some other odd details in the story. For example, just before Sugar finds the body in the backyard, she sees someone exit the yard through the bushes. However, Sugar never mentions this to the police, nor does it ever come up in the story again. Another example, when Sugar comes home to find her cat outside and two items missing from inside her house, it never occurs to her that someone may have opened the door, stole the items, and accidentally let the cat out in the process.

I enjoyed reading Game of Scones. I enjoyed the quirky characters, the descriptions of small-town life in Iowa, and even the fantasy of starting over in a new place with new friends, a new community, and a new business. Mary Lee Ashford’s casual, folksy style of writing makes the mundane world of St. Ignatius interesting. If you are looking for a fun book with quirky characters and a murder mystery thrown into the plot for good measure, then I recommend it.

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