Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Neela Snow
Meet Neela Snow — a culinary cozy with a café owner who knows before she thinks. A body behind the judging tent, a summer market full of secrets, and a tabby named Max.
Series: A Claire Winters cozy mystery
The Book: Petals, Preserves & Peril
Claire Winters knows two things the moment she finds the body behind the judging tent: that the woman is dead, and that it was no accident. The knowing always arrives before the thought does — it's just how Claire works — and at Millfield's Summer Market, with the ribbons still pinned and the preserves still cooling, her instinct is already certain this was murder.
The dead woman is Iris Bellamy, who ran the Summer Market with a gracious smile and an iron hand. She built something genuinely beautiful in Millfield, and she flattened the livelihood of anyone who got in her way to do it. Now someone has finally stopped her — and with her tabby Max at her heels and her friend Sophie digging through the town records, Claire sets out to find out who, before the wrong person takes the fall.
The suspects are not in short supply. There's Owen Pike, a farmer who watched his crops fail year after year while Iris prospered. There's Lila Bellamy, the niece kept so far under her aunt's thumb she may have finally snapped. As Claire pulls the threads, they tangle into water-board corruption, stolen opportunities, and the quiet, smiling cruelties of a woman who never once had to raise her voice — and the answer, when it comes, is simpler and sadder than Claire is ready for. Justice, she's learning, rarely feels like victory.
“A café owner whose intuition shows up before the evidence does, a summer market with teeth, and a tabby named Max underfoot—some of my favorite tropes!”
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