Betty Fletcher bakes the best sourdough in the Cotswolds. She also knows how to disarm a man with a bag of flour and make it look like an accident.

A freak blizzard has buried Bramblewick under three feet of snow, cutting the village off from the outside world and trapping a motley collection of locals and stranded travellers inside The Flour & Flower. Betty has hot coffee, fresh pastries, and enough provisions to wait out the storm. What she doesn’t have is patience for the quiet, polite man in the corner booth who is very clearly a professional killer.

He’s snowed in. He’s on the clock. And his target is sitting six feet away, blissfully unaware, eating a cinnamon roll.

With no phone signal, no roads out, and Constable Puddifoot stranded on the wrong side of a snowdrift, Betty is the only thing standing between a hitman and a body count. She’ll need to neutralise him quietly — using nothing but her kitchen, her wits, and a series of carefully staged “accidents” — before anyone realises this isn’t just a cosy snow day.

Major, naturally, has opinions about all of this. Most of them involve guarding the cheese scones.

Old Habits Die Batter is the third book in The Baker’s Spy Mysteries — a cozy mystery series with a sharp edge. Perfect for fans of locked-room puzzles, dangerously competent grandmothers, and very good dogs who take their jobs seriously.

Contains: a bottle-episode blizzard, a sourdough that will not be rushed, at least one weaponised baking tray, tactical use of oven mitts, and absolutely no on-page violence (but a great deal of menacing flour dust).