The emotions of other people taste of what they don’t say. Zélie Renier has tasted them all—but nobody ever asks for her opinion.
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“You’re a baker who senses things people don’t say.”
“I’m not a medium. Not a psychic, not anything you’re imagining.”
“I don’t imagine things. I observe.”
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Zélie is thirty-three, owns a pastry shop inherited from her grandmother in Durbuy—the “smallest city in the world”—and has a gift she never wanted: she tastes emotions. Every handshake is an interrogation. Every aura, a confession. Her macarons are legendary. What nobody knows is that she bakes other people’s feelings into her pastries. The toxic ones end up in the Cursed Compost, where something old has started to grow.
Until the mayor’s wife is found dead in Topiary Park. Trimmed boxwood shoved in her mouth. And a detective whose silence empties Zélie’s head for the first time in her life.
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“I have conditions.”
“I’m listening.”
“No forced physical contact. Contact amplifies the signal and I am not an instrument you plug in.”
“And third?”
“You pay for the pastries. Retail price. No police discount.”
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Thomas Evrard. Field jacket, black notebook, a Zippo he never lights. Zero aura. Zero signal. Thirty-three years of hearing too loud, and Thomas is complete silence.
Something stirs beneath that silence. Something that isn’t civilized, isn’t controlled, isn’t tame.
Something that wants to protect.
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Every emotion has a taste. Every pastry has a price. Every secret has an owner.
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A paranormal cozy mystery set in the Belgian Ardennes, where an empath baker with a sharp tongue and a touch-starved heart teams up with a stoic detective in a slow burn negotiated one macaron at a time. For readers who love heroines who bite before they smile, romances where every silence counts, and mysteries solved with butter and witchcraft.
📚 Book 1 of the Spells & Sugar series — can be read as a standalone.
