After a recent brush with death, Piper Donovan, aspiring actress and amateur wedding-cake maker, is in New Orleans hoping for a relaxing yet educational visit with the renowned pastry chef Bertrand Olivier. His Boulangerie Bertrand is in the French Quarter, surrounded by an array of small businesses antique store, muffuletta shop that are the fabric of the city. After Bertrand's wife settles Piper into the guest apartment over the shop, Piper takes a stroll, letting the magic of New Orleans envelop her. The next day the mood shifts from magical to sinister, when Muffuletta Mike is found dead, with the crime set to look like the work of one of the hoodoo spirits. Piper tries to focus on her work at the bakery and on a bit part in a local movie, but she is drawn into the mystery when another murder strikes closer to home. Before long, past secrets and current enmities in the neighborhood are exposed. Clark is skilled at providing motive and opportunity to many characters and keeping the suspense building to the end.--Muller, Karen Copyright 2010 Booklist

Clark's suspenseful fourth Piper Donovan mystery (after 2013's Footprints in the Sand) takes the baker/actress to New Orleans, where she's thrilled to be working as a guest baker at Boulangerie Bertrand in the French Quarter. Piper also lands an acting role that requires her to play a character entombed alive in a casket. When someone goes on a murder spree in the vicinity of Boulangerie Bertrand, Piper's boyfriend, FBI agent Jack Lombardi, urges her to get out of New Orleans as soon as possible, but she remains committed to finishing a wedding cake at the bakery. As the body count rises, locals connect the mysterious clues left at the crime scenes to voodoo, and the police consider no one above suspicion, even Piper. Amid a multitude of red herrings, the roller-coaster action builds to a most startling conclusion. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, William Morris Endeavor. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Piper Donovan travels to yet another notable vacation spot to bake yet another wedding cake and gets tossed into yet another series of murders. While she ponders what sort of cake would best commemorate the nuptials of antique-shop assistant Sabrina Houghton and Leo Yancy, owner of Bistro Sabrina, Piper's staying with Sabrina's friends Bertrand and Marguerite Olivier, of Royal Street's Boulangierie Bertrand, so that she can pick up some authentic New Orleans baking techniques. What could be cozier--especially when Piper, ever the hopeful actress, gets cast as Channing Tatum's girlfriend? True, her character dies in the first reel, and the scene in which she realizes that she's been buried alive brings on traumatic memories of Piper's last brush with violent death (Footprints in the Sand, 2013, etc.). What really turns Piper's stay into a nightmare, though, is the murder of Muffuletta Mike, the neighboring butcher. Will the good people of Royal Street--Sabrina's boss, Ellinore Duchamps, her flirtatious nephew Falkner the tour guide, bartender Wuzzy Queen, street musician Cecil Gregson--band together to repel the killer or turn their backs long enough for Piper to become the next victim? Think Margaret Truman in the Big Easy with a recipe for beignets or a lesser Agatha Christie with an unusually imperiled heroine and just enough hints of voodoo for the tourist trade.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.