Life is Sweeter with Chocolate… and Cozy Mysteries! Guest post by Sarah Fox

Foodie Fridays is Back! Today I welcome Cozy mystery writer Sarah Fox. Sarah is no stranger to foodie mysteries, having another series filled with mouthwatering food. Sarah has a new series, the True Confections Mystery series. Six Sweets Under, the first in the series, will be out this month.

SARAH FOX: LIFE IS SWEETER WITH CHOCOLATE ... AND COZY MYSTERIES!

Chocolate has been my favorite sweet treat for as long as I can remember, so it’s probably not surprising to people who know me that I’m now writing a cozy mystery series about a chocolate shop. However, a chocolate shop wasn’t the obvious choice to me when it came to finding a hook for my latest series. I knew that I wanted to write a cozy mystery set in a town with canals instead of roads and with cute cottages like those you might find in a charming English village. What I didn’t know was what job I wanted the main character to have. When chatting with my agent, she suggested a chocolate shop and I jumped at that idea right away (of course). That’s how I ended up with True Confections, a family-run chocolate shop in the picturesque canal town of Larch Haven, Vermont.

As I wrote Six Sweets Under, the first book in the True Confections Mystery series, I delved into deeper detail and came up with a variety of products that would be made by Becca Ransom, the main character, and sold in her family’s shop. I have fond memories of going to a small Vancouver chocolate shop called Lee’s Candies when I was little. We would get free samples of mint chocolate and leave with a bag of seconds, the chocolates that weren’t quite perfect enough to be sold at full price. Those little bags were full of surprises because they held an assortment of chocolates and you wouldn’t always know what you were about to bite into, only that it was likely to taste great.

Sadly, Lee’s Candies was destroyed by a fire years ago and that marked the end of the small business. These days when I buy seconds, they come from Purdys, my all-time favorite chocolate shop. Purdys calls them Almost Perfect Chocolates. In my True Confections series, I call them Misfits. Becca often packs several into a little paper bag to give to her lifelong friend Sawyer, now a police officer, whenever he stops by the shop. She always remembers to include something with peanut butter—his favorite.

Whenever it’s time to decide on flavors to showcase in each book in the series, I tend to choose my own favorites. Like Sawyer, I love the combination of chocolate and peanut butter, so I came up with a recipe for peanut butter pretzel truffles, which I’ve included in Six Sweets Under. The store also sells ice wine truffles (a product I love to buy from Purdys) and mint melty bonbons, which remind me of the mint chocolate I used to get at Lee’s. In future books, I hope to showcase seasonal flavors, like candy cane truffles and possibly apple caramels or something with pumpkin. Naturally, the taste testing stage is my favorite part of the recipe creation process.

I’ve often said that if books were food, cozy mysteries would be chocolate. After all, cozies are comfort reads and they make life sweeter. I hope that the details about the chocolates sold at True Confections will add a delicious note to the story and will make readers wish they could travel to Larch Haven and stop in at Becca’s shop for a free sample and maybe a few boxes to take home.

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Sarah Fox was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she developed a love for mysteries at a young age. When not writing novels, she is often reading her way through a stack of books or spending time outdoors with her English Springer Spaniel.