Jessa Maxwell

The Golden Spoon puts six contestants inside a baking competition at a Vermont mansion and then kills off Archie Morris, the show's brash new co-host, leaving the six as the suspects, a locked-room puzzle built from the machinery of a television bake-off. Published in 2023, it was the first adult novel by Jessica Olien, who signs her fiction with her grandmother's name, Jessa Maxwell. Olien reached it through cartooning and journalism, with comics in The New Yorker, and five picture books she wrote and illustrated for Balzer and Bray. Hulu optioned the novel as a limited series with Aline Brosh McKenna attached.