Cardamom & Co.
Asha’s spice and pastry shop on Maple Street, with the flat upstairs. Rows of brass jars, labelled in her own hand. Cumin. Cardamom. Coriander. Three kinds of cinnamon, because Americans only know one.
The world of the Cardamom & Co. Mysteries
Welcome to Cedar Hollow
A small town in Vermont, late March. The banner over Maple Street reads Cedar Hollow Maple Festival. Forty-seventh year. All welcome. Asha Iyer has lived here five months and has not yet decided whether she counts as part of the all welcome or as part of the welcoming.
Around the green
The places
The Sugar Maple Diner
Beau Lefebvre’s diner on Spruce Street. On a festival morning you can hear it from the street.
The festival
Stalls on the green, syrup vendors, a fiddle that needs tuning, the Quilting Circle, Lila’s free nail trims for festival pets, and Hollow Books by the post office with June Park chalking the sandwich board. Two hundred people, and one Polaroid taped to Asha’s stall: Methi: Shop Cat. Do Not Feed.
Who you’ll meet
The people
Asha Iyer
A pastry chef from Madras, five months in Cedar Hollow. She labelled every jar in her shop by hand when she opened in October, and still touches each one in turn every morning.
Methi
Shop cat. Orange, five years old, walks on a lead and has opinions about being carried. When insulted she twitches the tip of her tail and waits for you to stop.
Lila Monroe
The town vet, and Asha’s first friend in Cedar Hollow. Asha gave up trying to keep anything from her a long time ago.
Esther Whitcomb
Seventy-two, four feet eleven, and the Historical Society. Arrives on a wave of cold air and Chanel No. 5, and usually knows things before the rest of the town does.
Sheriff Marcus Chen
Three years the sheriff of Cedar Hollow, twelve before that in Boston, where he learned that the accounts you get in the first hour are the only ones nobody has had time to tidy.
Beau Lefebvre
Owns the Sugar Maple Diner. Speaks French to French people, English to English people, and a private third language to Asha.
Chapter One
Step inside
The first chapter opens in the shop at dawn, on the morning of the festival — the kettle on, Methi on the order pad, and a smell that has no business being there.