Tired of unpacking boxes in his new Vermont home, police detective Franklin Warren steps onto the porch for air and finds a wicker basket filled with rustic delicacies. They include "a slab of yellow butter, flakes of salt glistening on the surface ... a loaf of bread, still warm, the crust a deep brown ... [and] a jar of red jam — raspberry, according to the precisely lettered label." The year is 1965, Interstate 91 has just been built, and Warren has fled from a personal disaster in Boston to the fictional Vermont town of Bethany, where he joins the state police force. Just moments after tucking the leftovers from the basket into his "giant white Kelvinator" refrigerator, he's summoned to the neighbor's house to answer a phone call. A barn on Agony Hill has burned down, and a body was discovered in the wreckage. Over the course of the next 300 pages, Warren will investigate the case, fry eggs in a cast-iron pan, wrestle with his past and eat clam chowder at the local inn. Whether or not he solves the mystery is something you'll have to find out on your own. Released in August, Agony Hill is Hartland author Sarah Stewart Taylor's ninth mystery novel and the first entry in a new series, which will center on Warren and a cast of intriguing small-town New England characters in the years just before the author's birth. "I was born in 1971," she said. "It's always been a little bit of an obsession for me, wondering about the period right before I came on the scene." One aspect of the era that fascinates her is the food. "As I imagine [characters'] lives, I always think about what they're eating and what they're cooking," said Taylor, an enthusiastic cook who consulted vintage cookbooks as part of her research. "I really wanted to give readers the flavor of what life in Vermont was like during this period." She learned early lessons about food traditions from her family. Taylor was brought up on Long Island, but every summer the family packed up and moved to the New Hampshire side of the Upper Valley for two months. There, Taylor's grandmother, an avid gardener, "cooked in a way that really celebrated the fresh produce of the summer," she said. Many of the recipes her grandma made, including preserved and canned goods, harked…