Moonlight Murder Mystery Club: Half Baked Alibis

Some allergies are deadly. This one was deliberate.

When an aggressive property lawyer collapses at Crescent Harbor’s harvest festival, everyone assumes it’s a tragic accident—a man with a known allergy who ate the wrong thing. But Sage Holloway notices what no one else does: the faint golden sheen on his plate that doesn’t match any oil the vendors carry. Walnut oil has a very specific color. And the festival is tree nut free.

The suspect pool is long. Harrison Cross made enemies the way other people made small talk. But one man at that festival wasn’t eating, wasn’t mingling, wasn’t doing anything except standing very still with a cup of cider he never drank—watching Cross die.

Solving the murder should be enough. It isn’t.

Because the deeper Sage digs into the victim’s past, the more she finds—property deals that squeezed old families out of land they’d held for generations. Shell companies with too many layers. A retired teacher’s research that vanished the night she died. And the same name surfacing again and again, buried under enough paperwork to look like coincidence.

Then the most gracious woman in town invites her for tea, pours the Darjeeling, and says something that sounds like concern but feels like a warning.

In Crescent Harbor, the leaves are falling, the pattern is forming, and some alibis only hold up until a baker with a food science degree starts asking the wrong questions.

She’s solved two murders. Now the cat won’t stop staring at the one person nobody suspects—and this time, the danger isn’t what Sage has found. It’s who noticed her looking.