In today's spotlight I'm joining 

Berkley Mystery 

in celebrating the release of  

WITCHES AND WEDDING CAKE

Book 9 in the Magical Bakery Mysteries

by Bailey Cates

  

Baker Katie Lightfoot is crafting her own magical wedding cake and tracking down a malicious murderer in the newest installment of this New York Times bestselling series.

Katie will be marrying firefighter Declan McCarthy in less than a week, and she's still finding time to run the Honeybee Bakery, where she infuses sweets and treats with special spells and cheerful charms. But her hope of getting hitched without a hitch is short-lived. When Declan's family shows up early to enjoy a few extra days in Savannah, his youngest sister finds an unsavory surprise: her ex-husband, dead in a hotel room hours after they argued.

The ex was scam artist with a lot of enemies, but the argument puts Declan's sister under suspicion. Between dress fittings and dough-kneading, Katie—along with her witchy friends in the spellbook club—will really have to work some magic to figure out who killed the con man...or there may not be a wedding.

Planning a Fictional Wedding

Do you cry at weddings? I usually don’t but watching the ritual of two people pledging their lives to one another has an unmistakable emotional zing. I have a friend who always, I mean always, cries at weddings. And not just real weddings. Wedding on television. Weddings in commercials. Seriously.

So I have to wonder if the 9^th Magical Bakery Mystery, Witches and Wedding Cake, will bring on any waterworks when she reads it. In it, Katie Lightfoot and Declan McCarthy are getting ready to tie the knot in a few days. The wedding preparations actually began in the 8^th book, but they come to fruition in this one. Declan’s mother and two sisters are in town, which complicates things a bit because his older sister, Eliza, is very by-the-book when it comes to wedding traditions, and Katie is more of a free spirit who is willing to think outside the box. Then Declan’s younger sister finds her ex-husband dead in a seedy motel room, and that complicates things a LOT.

This is the second fictional wedding I’ve planned. I spent a lot of time figuring out just how Katie would want things to go. She and Declan just spent a lot of money renovating her carriage house so it will be big enough for two people to comfortably live together, so they need to keep wedding expenses down. She wants the ladies of the spellbook club to make up her wedding party, despite Eliza’s horror that one of them is in her eighties, one is pregnant, and none are brides “maids,” if you know what I mean.

Mimsey Carmichael owns a florist shop, and so she provides the wedding flowers – incorporating flower magic, naturally. The venue? The big backyard behind the carriage house, complete with witch’s garden and the lovely gazebo Katie had built there in book two. Katie loves the mismatched thrift shop chairs in the gazebo, so it made sense that she’d like a similar vibe in the seating for her guests. Sure enough, I found a wonderful event rental company in Savannah that fit the bill with vintage, distressed chairs and fixtures. Her dress? Not floofy white (readers may remember she had one like that for a wedding that didn’t happen, and she made that into a zombie bride costume for Halloween one year), but a deep plum lace sheath. She and Declan wrote their own vows, of course.

Everything is arranged and ready to go…until the judge who was to marry them had to leave town at the last minute, so they are left without an officiant.

Uh oh.

Bailey Cates believes magic is all around us if we only look. The next Magical Bakery Mystery, Spirits and Sourdough, is in the works. For more information about Bailey and her books, check out www.baileycates.com .

WITCHES AND WEDDING CAKE

is available now!

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