ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the rising of the goddesses in relation to the dark pressures of the twenty-first century around two urgent topics: nature and war. Specifically, the matter of war was distilled by the psychological impact of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, on the 11th of September 2001. Mystery novels draw broadly on the rise of the novel form itself in the eighteenth century. The chapter investigates relations to nature and responses to terrorism by examining a diverse sample of women’s detective fiction in the twenty-first century. It examines the divine qualities of Hestia in alliance with other goddesses in re-investing nature and human nature with the sacred. Carrot Cake Murder tries very hard to provide Hestia, goddess of hearth and home, for a troubled psyche. She arrives in the comfortable shape of Hannah Swenson, owner of The Cookie Jar in the iconically named town of Lake Eden.
