In Cold Chocolate: A Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery
Cozy Mystery
3rd in Series
Crooked Lane Books (September 11, 2018)
Hardcover: 350 Pages

Synopsis

In Dorothy St. James’s third delectable Southern Chocolate Shop mystery, a new batch of chocolate and troubles of the heart cause a string of disasters for the Chocolate Box’s new owner, Charity Penn.

The vintage seaside town of Camellia Beach, South Carolina seems like the perfect place for romance with its quiet beach and its decadent chocolate shop that serves the world’s richest dark chocolates. The Chocolate Box’s owner, Charity Penn, falls even further under the island’s moonlit spell as she joins Althea Bays and the rest of the turtle watch team to witness a new generation of baby sea turtles hatch and make their way into the wide ocean.

Before the babies arrive, gunshots ring out in the night. Cassidy Jones, the local Casanova, is found dead in the sand with his lover Jody Dalton—the same woman who has vowed to destroy the Chocolate Box—holding the gun. It’s an obvious crime of passion, or so everyone believes. But when Jody’s young son pleads with Penn to bring his mother back to him, she can’t say no. She dives headfirst into a chocolate swirl of truth and lies, and must pick through an assortment of likely (and sometimes unsavory) suspects before it’s too late for Penn and for those she loves in Dorothy St. James’s third rich installment of the Southern Chocolate Shop mysteries, In Cold Chocolate.

Guest Post

The Magic of Sea Turtles

I lived at the beach for twenty years. My husband and I moved there shortly before I’d graduated from graduate school. The salty water washing the ever-changing sandy shore, the constant hiss and crash of the waves, and the summer laughter of children—the beach is a wondrous place. But, for me, there is nothing as magical as the birth of sea turtles.

Source: Shutterstock

Sea turtles seem like such ancient creatures. It’s as if their large, slow-moving bodies below to another time. And yet, whenever I see a majestic mother turtle dragging herself onshore, I can’t help but feel as if I’m glimpsing into the knowing and often weary eyes of a being that has more wisdom than I can ever hope to possess.

The mother sea turtle, in the darkness of night, digs a hole with her back flippers and lays a nest that often contains more than a hundred eggs. She then covers them up and returns to the ocean with nothing more than the hope that at least some of her children will survive to continue her line. If all goes well (and the nest is left untouched by crabs, coyotes, raccoons, fire ants, and man), about sixty days later the eggs will hatch. The tiny sea turtles, with shells not much bigger than a silver dollar, dig themselves out of the nest. And following the light of the moon and the stars, they hurry toward the ocean.

Source: South Carolina Department of Natural Resources

Once in the water, they swim for up to thirty-six hours without rest, to reach the relative safety of floating clumps of Sargassum seaweed. They’ll stay floating within the seaweed, camouflaged and feeding on small invertebrates for up to ten years. These long lived reptiles won’t start breeding and returning to the beaches until they are between twenty and fifty years old.

In all my years living at the beach, I always felt the same thrill of excitement as the first time I walked on the beach in the morning and happened across the tracts left from a nesting sea turtle and the little mound where her eggs had been hidden. These ancient wanderers never cease to amaze me.

When I started to write the third book in my Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery series, I knew right away that I wanted to include these amazing and yet so vulnerable animals. The main kind of sea turtle that nests on the South Carolina shores—where the series is set—is the loggerhead sea turtle. And what better pairing for sea turtles than to come up with a sea salt chocolate turtle recipe? I also enjoyed sharing conservation ideas for sea turtles in the book.

While sea turtles have done well enough without our help, their numbers are dwindling as we increase our fishing in their waters and keep developing our beaches. Luckily, there are some things we can do to help protect sea turtles:

• Never disturb a sea turtle crawling to or from the ocean.
• Once a sea turtle has begun nesting, observe her only from a distance.
• Do not shine lights on a sea turtle or take flash photography.
• Turn out all lights visible from the beach, dusk to dawn, from May through October.
• Turn off all outdoor and deck lighting to reduce disorientation for nesting adults and hatchlings.
• Close blinds and drapes on windows that face the beach or ocean.
• Fill in holes on the beach at the end of each day as adults and hatchlings can become trapped.
• Do not leave beach chairs, tents etc. on the beach overnight.
• Never attempt to ride a sea turtle.

Sea turtles, chocolate turtles, and a murder chill the eccentric residents of Camellia Beach in my latest Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery series, In Cold Chocolate.

About the Author

A lover of puzzles and perhaps a bit too nosey about other people’s lives, Dorothy St. James is a former Folly Beach beach bum. She now lives in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina with her husband, precocious daughter, a slightly (OK, terribly) needy dogs, and the friendliest cat you’d ever meet. She has degrees in Wildlife Biology and Public Administration and as an urban planner, worked for many years telling the stories of small southern towns.

Author of a dozen novels, Dorothy enjoys writing both cozy mysteries and romance. Her works have been nominated for many awards including: the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Alliance Southern Book Prize, Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, Reviewers International Organization Award, National Reader’s Choice Award, CataRomance Reviewers’ Choice Award, and The Romance Reviews Today Perfect 10! Award. Reviewers have called her work: “amazing”, “perfect”, “filled with emotion”, and “lined with danger.”

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