Fudge Cupcake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Fluke quite cleverly ties the title of this one into the entire story. We have two mysteries running side by side. The first one actually introduced is the Fudge Cupcake mystery. It seems that the little town of Lake Eden is creating a community cookbook. Naturally, Hannah is in charge of collecting and testing the recipes submitted for inclusion. Although the deadline for submissions has passed, she accepts her mother's pot roast recipe - if you have met her mother through other books in this series, you will understand why. The other is brought to her by a woman whose husband is extremely anxious to have his recently deceased mother's signature fudge cupcake recipe included.

When Hannah reads over the recipe, she finds that one line reads: "Add 1/2 cup of secret ingredient." Unfortunately, neither the woman's son nor her daughter-in-law is able to enlighten her in the matter of the secret ingredient. Unwilling to disappoint them, Hannah accepts the recipe and begins a quest for the secret ingredient. Many experiments follow, and sure enough, the ingredient is discovered - by an external clue, fortunately - or Edison and his four hundred experimental filaments would have had nothing on the intrepid staff of The Cookie Jar.

The actual murder had nothing to do with cupcakes, except that the sheriff was apparently eating one when he was murdered and dumped in the dumpster at the high school. Hannah's brother-in-law is the first suspect, since he is running for sheriff against the present sheriff, now dead in the dumpster. There has been a certain amount of acrimony involved, including the sheriff shouting at him within the hearing of most of the station that Bill would only win "over his dead body." Which is, in fact, how he did win - still he only got 80% of the vote - and he was running against a dead guy.

Bill manages to get an alibi established and the next person of interest is the sheriff's not particularly grieving widow. Enough!! Read it yourself.

The mystery ingredient was raspberry syrup, but I'm not telling who bashed the sheriff in the head - doesn't have quite the same meter as "I shot the sheriff," does it?