Kind, quiet Tannie Maria isn't a woman who draws much notice. She leads a solitary life, writing recipes for the local gazette, cooking with ingredients from her garden, and chatting with her pet chicken, Morag. When Maria becomes the newspaper's advice columnist, she peppers her responses with delectable recipes to help people fix their problems. But after a woman who wrote to her turns up dead, Maria and her colleague, rookie journalist Jessie,...

Maria helps a letter writer struggling with her faith and finally figures out who has been following her around town. Jessie's cousin who works at the Koop has a tip-off for her. Khaya and Maria bond over dinner, but their evening is cut short when they get a shocking call.

Maria and Jessie and local detective Khaya are all trying to solve Martine's murder. The prime suspects are Dirk, Martine's husband, and Anna, her best friend, who was also in love with her. Without enough evidence to charge either of them, the police let them go, but tensions between the two quickly boil over into violence. Meanwhile, in Scotland two people are trying to track down Maria.

While scrutinizing the crime scene late at night, Jessie and Maria hear another murder taking place, as Martine's gardener, Lawrence, is killed. Scared off from investigating, Maria tries to help a man who has been deceiving his fiancée, and Jessie helps her mother solve a mystery at the local hospital. Meanwhile, Anna and Dirk are still trying to kill each other, even from their hospital beds.

When newspaper editor Hattie tells Maria that her recipe column is being discontinued, Maria and rookie journalist Jessie compete to write the new advice column-and, of course, Maria squeezes a recipe in there, too. One of Maria's letter writers is a woman with an abusive husband, and when Jessie happens upon a crime scene, they quickly figure out that the victim is Maria's letter writer, Martine.

Martine's cousin Candy arrives in town to plan the funeral, and she quickly gets in the way of Jessie and Regardt's budding romance. With Jessie avoiding the office, Maria focuses on a letter writer in search of her father and tries to avoid her Scottish connections, who are still looking for her. After learning what Grace had to say about Martine, Candy is convinced she knows who the killer is.