My name is Cloris McWerther. I’m the food editor at American Woman, the women’s magazine where crafts editor Anastasia Pollack and I both work. I also keep Anastasia supplied with sweets because Anastasia’s life is such that she always needs a sugar rush, along with constant infusions of caffeine, to get through the day. You would, too, if you constantly found yourself up to your eyeballs in murder and mayhem. As her best friend, I’ve gotten dragged into a few of her escapades from time to time and even saved her life once.

I don’t mind playing Watson to Anastasia’s Sherlock, but I much prefer doing it from afar. You could say I’m ill-disposed toward dead things—especially dead bodies. In all fairness, though, so is Anastasia, but that hasn’t kept the body count from rising whenever she’s around.

Recently, the two of us were roped into presenting workshops and judging needlework and baking competitions at the inaugural conference of the New Jersey chapter of the Stitch and Bake Society, an organization of retired women executives now spending their golden years discovering their inner crafter and baker. Sounds like fun, right? Guess again.

Right from the start something was extremely odd about this conference. Anastasia and I have taken part in countless conferences over the years. We know most are planned at least a year in advance. But not this one. Apparently, it was slapped together within days. Either that, or someone waited until the last minute to invite the speakers. The two of us had less than a week to prepare three hands-on, hour-long presentations, each for 100 attendees.

However, when we arrived at the venue, the swanky Beckwith Chateau, we discovered we’d been manipulated. To what end, we had no idea, but it turned out there were only twenty-five attendees at the conference. We soon learned the entire chapter consisted of only thirty members and five of them were on a cruise they’d booked a year ago!

Things went downhill from there, beginning with Anastasia and me finding large monetary bribes stuffed into our conference packets. You’d think we were judging a Food Network or HGTV competition with the winner getting her own TV show, not a conference competition where the winners received small plaques.

Why would someone have such a compulsion to win at any cost? These women were all extremely successful retirees who had broken through the glass ceiling back when most of their contemporaries had limited career opportunities. If they worked at all, it was as salesgirls, secretaries, telephone operators, teachers, nurses, or librarians. And only until they married. After that most of them settled into Suzy Homemaker roles.

But things got even stranger when one of the women was found to have died in her sleep the first night. Or had she? Anastasia may consider herself a reluctant amateur sleuth, but she’s been around enough crime scenes at this point (after all, this is the tenth book in the series) that her Spidey senses immediately began to tingle.

Things got even worse at that point. I won’t go into detail because Anastasia and I (and Lois Winston, the author who created us) would prefer you read the book to find out what happens next, but I can assure you A LOT OF STUFF HAPPENS—not the least being that we discovered another dead body.

All I can say, is the next time our executive director assigns us to work at a conference, we’re demanding hazard pay.

Stitch, Bake, Die!, An Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery #10
Genre: Cozy
Release: October 2021
Purchase Link

With massive debt, a communist mother-in-law, a Shakespeare-quoting parrot, and a photojournalist boyfriend who may or may not be a spy, crafts editor Anastasia Pollack already juggles too much in her life. So she’s not thrilled when her magazine volunteers her to present workshops and judge a needlework contest at the inaugural conference of the New Jersey chapter of the Stitch and Bake Society, a national organization of retired professional women. At least her best friend and cooking editor Cloris McWerther has also been roped into similar duties for the culinary side of the 3-day event taking place on the grounds of the exclusive Beckwith Chateau Country Club.

The sweet little old ladies Anastasia is expecting to meet are definitely old, and some of them are little, but all are anything but sweet. She’s stepped into a vipers’ den that starts with bribery and ends with murder. When an ice storm forces Anastasia and Cloris to spend the night at the Chateau, Anastasia discovers evidence of insurance scams, medical fraud, an opioid ring, long-buried family secrets, and a bevy of suspects. Can she piece together the various clues before she becomes the killer’s next target?

Crafting tips included.

About the author:
USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction under her own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry.

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