IRISH SODA BREAD MURDER

O’Connor’s is the only story actually set on the Emerald Isle. “Irish Soda Bread Murder” takes place during Galway City’s annual psychic fair. None of the five participants predict that Ronan Stone, the city’s most in-demand psychic, will be felled before the event even starts by a bite of peanut butter hidden in a tin of the titular delicacy. But Ronan’s EpiPen has gone missing, leaving him a goner. How the murderer was able to sneak the smelly allergen into the treat is the stuff of Irish shaggy-dog stories. Ehrhart’s “An Irish Recipe for Murder” jumps across the ocean to Arborville, a small town on the Hudson River where petty intrigue is the order of the day. Handsome photographer Kieran Malone is also dispatched by a bite of soda bread, this time infected by deadly botulism toxin. Amateur sleuths Bettina Fraser and Pamela Paterson crack the case with panache, although the solution is medically implausible. The tale furthest from the motherland is also the funniest. In Ireland’s “Mrs. Claus and the Sinister Soda Bread Man,” a water leak at her B&B calls April Claus, the wife of Santa, home to Cloudberry Bay, Oregon, in the middle of her annual stint at the North Pole. For reasons unfathomable, she takes three Santaland elves with her. To their surprise, Cloudberry Bay, which sleeps through most of the winter, is in the midst of a full-throttle St. Patrick’s Day festival. The descent of the leprechaun-adjacent elves on the celebration couldn’t be more predictable—or more hilarious.