Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Tessa Crumb
Series: A Maisie Brooks Cozy Mystery
The Book:
Maisie Brooks came back to Meadow Creek to take over her late grandmother's café, and she arrived braced for exactly two things: gossip, and a learning curve steeper than anybody warned her about. What she had not planned for was a first blind date who never walked through the door—because by the time she was checking her watch, he was already dead on a road outside town, in what everyone official was calling a tragic accident.
Maisie doesn't think it was one. Nothing she can point to at first, just the small wrongness of a story that fits together a little too neatly for a town this size. So she starts paying attention, which in Meadow Creek is its own kind of dangerous. The café gives her a front-row seat to every conversation that matters, an old friend is willing to be pulled into it, and her dog is better company on a long think than most people. What she finds is that the picture-perfect surface has cracks in it, and that they've been there a while.
The suspects come into focus faster than the truth does. There's a girlfriend whose grief runs defensive rather than sad. There's a sheriff who seems less interested in what happened than in having it settled. And there's a whole town's worth of people who would rather Maisie went back to running the café and left the rest alone. By the time she understands she's stirring up more than gossip, somebody has already decided how far they're willing to go to keep the thing buried—and Maisie is the only one still asking.
Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (41 reviews)
“A café sleuth’s real advantage isn’t nerve, it’s position—everybody in town walks past her counter eventually, and they all talk. Maisie Brooks inherits a café, a blind date who never shows, and a whole town that has quietly agreed the death was an accident. I want to know who agreed to that first.”
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