A Murder Between Raspberry and Vanilla

A record heatwave over Lindenbrück — and a festival that ends with a dead man.

The thermometer has been climbing past thirty-five degrees for days, and right in the middle of it the Squirrel Café opens its very own ice cream counter on the new terrace. Hanna Förster and her assistant Mia barely have time to taste the first batch of raspberry ice cream before the village's summer Brook Festival is upon them — with boat rides, lanterns on the water, and a drinks wholesaler who lets absolutely no one near his refrigerated van. Even the tomcat Streusel has retreated, with great dignity, to the coolest corner of the cellar and refuses to come out.

But on the morning after the festival, Hanna finds drinks-and-ice-cream wholesaler Volker Kessler lying motionless inside his own sun-baked van — a tragic workplace accident, say the detectives from the county town, caused by the broken cooling unit everyone in the village already knew about. Hanna doesn't believe a word of it. Because the rear door, which used to open with a flick of one finger, jammed that morning as if someone had wedged it shut — and it hadn't been jammed the evening before.

Between melting ice cream and old newspaper archives, Hanna starts asking questions again — with the ever-resolute Edith (who half-jokingly puts herself on the suspect list), the wonderfully overwhelmed festival organiser Hilde, a cat who won't set one paw near the cellar door, and conscientious village constable Jonas Reuter, who this summer finally, openly shows how much he cares. A daughter who wanted her father to finally take her seriously. A rival who'd spent twenty years locked out of the business. A driver still waiting on unpaid overtime. And somewhere among them, someone who knew exactly when Kessler counted his takings alone.

And while the festival carries on, a quiet closeness grows between the tight-lipped fruit farmer Theo and the widowed village-shop cashier Sabine — one neither of them quite dares to name.

A Murder Between Raspberry and Vanilla is the fourth case in the cosy, feel-good Squirrel Café Mysteries: a small village in high summer, a warm-hearted cast, not a drop of gore — just the smell of ice cream, a cat underfoot, and a fair-play puzzle you can solve right alongside Hanna.

Works perfectly as a stand-alone — you do not need Books 1–3 to follow this one. Includes two original recipes from the Squirrel Café at the end of the book; more from Hanna's kitchen is in the recipe collection.