DEATH BY CHOCOLATE CHIP CUPCAKE

Pastries are not normally the weapons of choice for any murderers, so readers and pastry lovers can relax: No chocolate chip cupcakes were used to kill anybody in Sarah Graves’ new mystery novel.

With “Death by Chocolate Chip Cupcake,” best-selling mystery writer Graves has cooked up another fast-paced crime story in her “Death by Chocolate” mystery series set in Eastport, Maine (where she lives). Her featured amateur detective Jacobia (Jake) Tiptree is no longer pounding nails in the popular “Home Repair is Homicide” series. Instead, she and best friend Ellie own the Chocolate Moose Bakery in Eastport.

When Jake and Ellie aren’t creating screwy new taste treats like chocolate pizza or chocolate-covered venison jerky, they investigate murders. Eastport seems to have a lot — “Something about Eastport just brings out the murder in people” — hardly a Chamber of Commerce slogan. This is the fifth book in the series, a complicated, murderous free-for-all on a stormy night, in a haunted house with party guests getting bumped off — sort of like Agatha Christie on steroids and Red Bull.

Summer is over, the tourists are gone, so when aging glamorous Hollywood movie star Ingrid Merryfield drives into town with her menacing armed bodyguard and a weird story, Jake and Ellie are suspicious. Ingrid bought Cliff House, a crumbling old mansion where 10 murders occurred years before. Now, she wants Jake and Ellie to cater desserts at a lavish party for an oddball group of Hollywood has-beens, hangers-on and other sketchy people. And that night the murders start.

Trapped in Cliff House overnight, the storm rages, earthquakes tremble, bodies pile up and Jake and Ellie face confusing, diabolical plots and killings with conflicting motives. Add secret passages, underground tunnels, nonstop deadly perils and miraculous escapes, and Graves has baked up an over-the-top bewildering conclusion.

PEAKS ISLAND AND PORTLAND HARBOR

For some people nostalgia means remembering all the good times they never had; for others it’s thinking about past times we wish we had today, those bygone days of innocence and life’s simple pleasures.

Arcadia Publishing’s series “Images of America” features books by local authors that showcase histories of American communities, to preserve local heritage through period photographs and anecdotal narratives. This slim volume is not a comprehensive history of Peaks Island or Portland Harbor, but is more a time capsule of life, work, people and events in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The two authors are affiliated with the Fifth Maine Regiment Museum on Peaks Island. They have captured the essence of the island and the harbor with a collection of 181 vintage black-and-white photographs, coupled with fun and fascinating facts and stories that reveal true appreciation for local history.

This is more a story of Peaks Island than Portland Harbor, briefly covering the very early presence of Wabanaki seasonal use of the area, then the arrival of the first English colonists. Most of the book, however, covers the 1800s to late 1960s, the period when Peaks Island became a popular tourist destination. They discuss the ferries, cottages, family and community life, the dramatic rise of island tourism making Peaks Island “the Coney Island of Maine” and World War II.

By the 1890s, Peaks Island had 18 hotels, theaters, dancehalls, a casino, restaurants, an amusement park with roller coaster, ring toss and shooting gallery, even its own summer-league baseball team. Learn about kitchen bands and “swimming costume” rentals, the World War II garrison and gun batteries, how ferry captains navigated in fog without instruments, and where actor Martin Landau made his first stage appearance.

Bill Bushnell lives and writes in Harpswell.

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