A Murder Between Pumpkin and Chestnut

A harvest festival, a café anniversary — and a dead man in the fermentation cellar.

A year after taking over the Squirrel Café, the harvest festival falls exactly on Hanna Förster's café anniversary — crowned by a festive cider tasting at the newly inherited Görlach farm. Between carved pumpkins, the scent of roasting chestnuts and the first cold nights of the year, half of Lindenbrück is getting ready for the biggest celebration of the autumn. The tomcat Streusel, meanwhile, has claimed the chestnut baskets for himself.

But the morning after, Hanna finds the returned heir, Matthias Görlach, lying motionless in the fermentation cellar beneath the apple barn. The detectives from Marbeck call it a tragic accident by carbon dioxide — the fermentation gas that builds up in any cider cellar. Hanna doesn't believe a word of it. Because the cellar door was bolted from the outside, though nobody had used the old bolt in decades.

Between the harvest festival and old newspaper archives, Hanna starts asking questions again — with the ever-resolute Edith, the overwhelmed festival-committee chair Hilde, the tomcat Streusel, and conscientious village constable Jonas Reuter. An investor with an interest in the orchard meadow. A nephew who has worked the farm alone for years. A neighbour who fears for his old right to the cider press.

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

A Murder Between Pumpkin and Chestnut is the fifth case in the cosy, feel-good Squirrel Café Mysteries: a small village in the North Hessian autumn, a warm-hearted cast, not a drop of gore — just the scent of pumpkin spice, a cat underfoot, and a fair-play puzzle you can solve right alongside Hanna.

Every case is solved within its book – Hanna's story continues. Best enjoyed in order. Includes two original recipes from the Squirrel Café at the end of the book; more from Hanna's kitchen is in the recipe collection.