While delivering a box of Halloween treats to her mom’s Mahjong group, Jules gets a bad feeling when one of the group finds a note warning “the dragon is dead” in an antique game set she recently purchased. When Jules finds a dead man in a dragon costume slumped in front of her bakeshop on Halloween night, she becomes obsessed with finding out who did this and why and she can’t sleep until she does.

Do NOT read this book if you’re hungry – the descriptions of all the seasonal foods and the recipes recited step-by-step during the story will have you salivating. Some of the suspects felt inconsistent in their characterization to me and between that and the distraction of amazing-sounding food and red herrings thrown the reader’s way, I will confess I was confused by the end. This is book 17 in the series, so maybe I just didn’t know the cast of characters well enough? I did like the writing though, and the recipes, so I think I’ll give this series another try.

*Thank you to St. Martin's Press for a review copy