The Maple Grove Gazette - April 18, 2026

Maple Grove's Only Newspaper of Record—Est. This Week—Edited by Mr. Ellison, Town Archivist & Historian

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK

It has come to my attention that Maple Grove lacks a proper newspaper. For a town with this much history —and, frankly, this many incidents—the absence of a written record is nothing short of a civic failure. I intend to correct that, starting today. Expect thorough reporting, editorial restraint, and absolutely no gossip.

(Mildred has already submitted three corrections to this paragraph. I have ignored all of them.)

📜POLICE BLOTTER — EASTER EGG-STRAVAGANZA INCIDENT

Saturday, April 12 Update—Town Square Event April 5

The Maple Grove Ladies Group Easter Egg-stravaganza proceeded without incident for approximately eleven minutes.

At 12:14 PM, volunteer coordinator Charlene announced the start of the Golden Egg Hunt, in which one gold-painted egg—containing a gift certificate to the Calamity Jane’s Toys and Trinkets—was hidden somewhere in the town square. Participants were instructed to search "calmly and in an orderly fashion." This instruction was optimistic.

At 12:17 PM, Lisa—who this editor will note was not an official participant—announced that she had "a feeling" about the Golden Egg's location. She proceeded toward the Ladies Group refreshment table with what witnesses described as "a very determined walk." Several children followed.

At 12:18 PM, Lisa's determined walk became a determined reach across the refreshment table for a decorative basket she was certain contained the egg. It did not contain the egg. It contained two dozen deviled eggs prepared by Charlene herself, which were launched from the table when Lisa lost her balance and caught the edge of the tablecloth.

The resulting chain of events was as follows: deviled eggs became airborne. Children screamed—some in horror, most in delight. Charlene, who had been standing directly behind the table adjusting a centerpiece, received the majority of the impact. One deviled egg landed in her hair. Two more found her Easter cardigan. The decorative bunny centerpiece toppled into the lemonade pitcher.

Charlene demanded an immediate investigation. Officer Markle responded and, after surveying the scene, reportedly said, "There's no crime here, ma'am, just egg salad."

The Golden Egg was later found by a six-year-old named Oliver, lodged beneath the park bench nearest to the gazebo. Lisa maintains she was "very close."

Chief Carter declined to comment, though witnesses noted he was trying hard not to smile.

No charges were filed. The tablecloth has not been recovered.

COMMUNITY NOTICES

LOST & FOUND: One Easter bonnet, pale yellow, with deviled egg staining. Found near the gazebo. Owner may claim at the front counter of Brewed Awakenings. Please bring proof of ownership. (Charlene, we know it's yours. Just come get it.)

BREWED AWAKENINGS SPRING MENU: Jenna McGregor's café has introduced its spring menu, featuring lavender honey lattes and a gluten-free lemon scone that this editor can personally confirm is excellent. The chalkboard outside has been restabilized after last week's wind incident. Biscuit remains on greeting duty.

HISTORICAL NOTE: This is not the first Easter-related disruption in Maple Grove. In 1987, the egg hunt was suspended after a raccoon was discovered nesting inside the prize basket. In 1994, a disagreement over hiding locations resulted in three eggs placed on the roof of the post office, where they remained until July. We are, if nothing else, consistent.

🔍 Fellow Sleuths Worth Following

Guest Sleuth picks this week—four authors I think you'll love. Click through to meet them and grab their books.

🎻 The Great Nashville Bake Off Mishap — Greta Sinclair

Hattie Leiper never imagined her baking could earn a handshake from a famous TV judge — especially one followed by his sudden collapse. Between competitive bakers, sugary secrets, and her opinionated furbabies (Moose the Chow, Mini Pearl the Yorkie, and Cecil the crime-magnet cat), Hattie pieces together clues that nobody else sees coming. A 2025 Global Book Awards Silver Medal winner — and for good reason.

👉 Meet Greta and grab the book →

🐕 Dead in the Wool — Etta True

A summer fiber festival in the small town of Seven Springs should be all about fleece and folk music. But when the Saturday Spinners find a body in the fleece tent, fiber artist Adri Foster and her Border Collie, Snooper, are on the case. Gossip spreads fast, suspects multiply, and Snooper notices what everyone else overlooks. 4.9 stars — readers are obsessed.

👉 Meet Etta and grab the book →

🐉 Wildergrove Whispers — Blossom SeaFarrer

A little something different this week — a dragon on a sacred quest gets trapped by a spell cast by a quiet girl with secrets of her own. When his counterspell binds her right back, neither can escape without the other. Fantasy romance with heart, danger, and a bond that was never part of the plan.

👉 Meet Blossom and grab the book →

🌶️ Spiced to Death — Susana Sage

When Tilly Martin trades city life for a needlepoint shop in small-town Texas, she doesn't expect a murdered chef at the food festival. Secret ingredients, stolen recipes, family rivalries — and a mischievous gray cat named Stitches — pull her into a whodunit that simmers with Hill Country charm.

👉 Meet Susana and grab the book →

🧁 The Main Course

GHOSTS DON'T USE BLUEPRINTS IS LIVE!

I'm sitting here with my coffee going cold because I keep refreshing the page to see the buy button and every time I see it I feel a very specific kind of dizzy that I think is just what it feels like to have put something genuinely personal into the world.

Here is what you need to know about this book:

It starts with Jenna McGregor as a teen, in a town that doesn't quite know what to do with her yet. It ends with the beginning of everything you already know — the friendships, the café, the particular gift for finding trouble that has defined her adult life.

In between, there is a ghost story (sort of), a mystery (definitely), a hallway disaster (not Jenna's fault, mostly), and a moment between Jenna and Lisa that made me laugh when I wrote it and still makes me a little giggly when I re-read it.

It's $3.99 now — but the story is exactly what I hoped it would be.

Get your copy of Ghosts Don’t Use Blueprints.

And if you've already read it and want to make my entire month — a review on Amazon or Goodreads means more than I can say. Even one line. Even just the stars.

✍️ Behind the Scenes

My granddaughter HayHay (nickname) and I set out to make rice crispy treats with our leftover Peeps this week. We got about two minutes in before she announced she was going to "film it." She narrated the entire process in segments like a tiny cooking show host—filming the entire time—complete with dramatic pauses and commentary on the melting marshmallows. I haven't laughed that hard in weeks. Charlie supervised from a barstool and looked deeply unimpressed.

Thank you for being here, fellow sleuths. Truly.

Willow 🌿

Meet Willow

Author, School Board member, and gluten-free baker. I write the Jenna McGregor mysteries from my home in Michigan, fueled by coffee and Peloton PRs.

Want to stay in the know? Get the Maple Grove Gazette

Weekly Notebook: One Week Away — and the Clock Is Ticking

🌿 The Maple Grove Update

Spring is fully committed in Maple Grove now—no more teasing. The lilac bushes along Birchwood Lane have gone from bare sticks to something that smells like a promise, and Brewed Awakenings has officially moved the patio chairs outside, which Mildred interpreted as a personal invitation. She showed up with her own cushion and a thermos of something she refused to identify.

Jenna has been distracted this week in ways she can't quite explain. Restless, maybe—the way you get when you know something is coming and you can't decide if you're excited or terrified or some particularly inconvenient combination of both. Lisa says Mercury is in something. Joe says it's just the weather changing. Mildred just keeps watching the treeline like she always does, sipping whatever is in that thermos, not looking worried at all.

My daffodils are a sea of yellow in my front border. Tulips are starting to pop up now, deep red and butter yellow, standing at attention in the front border like they have somewhere important to be. I feel the same way this week. Seven days, fellow sleuths. Seven days.

📜The Weekly Tasting Menu

Three Guest Sleuth picks this week—each one hand-selected because I think you'll love them. Here's the lineup:

🔍 Guest Sleuth Spotlights

🐎 Snowfall at Silver Run—Ellis Thorne When divorced horse-rescue owner Sable Jones's Labrador comes home with a mysterious scarf, a death ruled an accident starts to feel like anything but. A cozy mystery set in an equestrian community—warm, character-driven, and completely hard to put down. Find it on Amazon

🐾 Murder on the Morning Route— Daisy Stone Former corporate burnout Megan traded the city for a seaside town and a dog-walking business—until she finds a body near the lighthouse and her marketing brain starts noticing patterns nobody else does. Cozy, charming, and anchored by the best beagle-corgi sidekick in the genre. Get your free copy

🤠 Confessions of a Wanna-Be Cowgirl—Sylvia Grant A little something different this week — a feel-good small-town romance with dry humor and emotional heart for when you want laughs without a body count. Find it here

🧁 The Main Course

Fellow sleuths — seven days from right now, Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints will be officially in the world.

And seven days from right now, the price goes from $0.99 to $3.99.

I've been watching the pre-order numbers tick up all week, and every single one of them makes me a little teary in a way I'm blaming entirely on spring allergies. This book is different from anything else I've written—it's smaller and quieter in some ways, but louder in all the ways that matter. Teen-aged Jenna doesn't know yet what she's capable of. She's still figuring out who she is, who she can trust, and whether a girl who sees the worst in people can still choose to believe in them anyway.

I think a lot of us have been that girl.

If you've been waiting—this is the week. One dollar and ninety-nine cents for a few more days. After April 18th, the window closes and the price goes up to stay.

Get Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints on Amazon — $0.99 this week only

And if you've already pre-ordered — thank you. Genuinely. You have no idea what it means to have you waiting on the other side of launch day.

✍️ Behind the Scenes

have been stress-cleaning my office under the guise of "preparing for launch week," which mostly means I moved three piles of things from one surface to another. Charlie has decided that the new arrangement of said piles makes an excellent napping platform, and honestly, I can't argue with her logic. Seven days. We've got this.

Until next week, fellow sleuths —

Willow 🌿

Meet Willow

Author, School Board member, and gluten-free baker. I write the Jenna McGregor mysteries from my home in Michigan, fueled by coffee and Peloton PRs.

Want to stay in the know? Get the Weekly Notebook

Weekly Notebook: Someone’s Been in Jenna’s Kitchen

🍵 The Maple Grove Update

It started, as most things in Maple Grove do, with someone having a perfectly reasonable idea that immediately became a situation.

Jenna offered to host Easter egg decorating. She said this out loud, to multiple people, without a single contingency plan. Within forty minutes, her kitchen contained: six opinionated women, four competing egg-dyeing methods, one large bowl of rice inexplicably dyed magenta, and a six-year-old in latex gloves who had taken full creative control of twelve eggs and a can of shaving cream.

Lisa had, naturally, predicted the shaving cream. "I had a feeling," she said, from a safe distance near the back door. Mildred arrived, surveyed the scene, and immediately began reorganizing the dye stations in a way that "made tactical sense." Jenna's kitchen looked, by the end of it, like a tie-dyed glitter bomb had made a very committed decision. Joe, who had been summoned by a friend's emergency approximately eight minutes after the decorating began, was unavailable for comment. Jenna strongly suspects he knew.

When the eggs were done — each one a small masterpiece of chaotic color and absolutely zero coordination — they were beautiful. Obviously. The kids went outside. The adults looked at the kitchen. Someone put on a kettle. The coffee handled the rest.

📜The Weekly Tasting Menu

Fellow sleuths, I've been reading, and I have recommendations. Consider this your Easter weekend TBR — these authors are writing exactly our kind of trouble.

🔍 This Week's Guest Sleuth Spotlights

🐣 Death at the Easter Egg Scramble — Bessie Barr This one showed up at exactly the right time in my life (see: above, re: glitter). Bessie Barr is one of my personal favorites, and this Easter-set mystery has all the cozy chaos you'd expect from the season, plus a mystery sharp enough to keep you up past the candy coma. If you haven't found Bessie yet, fix that immediately. 👉 Grab it here →

🏇 Fencing and Foul Play — Nina Hunt The title alone had me. Nina Hunt delivers the kind of mystery where the setting does half the storytelling — and Fencing and Foul Play uses every inch of it. Bring snacks. 👉 Grab it here →

🌙 Murder She Whispered — DT Rose Atmospheric, clever, and the kind of book that makes you suspicious of your own neighbors in the best possible way. DT Rose has a gift for quiet dread dressed up in cozy clothes. 👉 Grab it here →

⭐ A Five Star Murder — LB Dayton High-end setting. High-stakes mystery. LB Dayton earns every star in the title. This one's for when you want your cozy mystery to feel just a little bit glamorous. 👉 Grab it here →

🐰 Murder on the Bunny Slope — Gemma Harper Ski lodge + Easter + someone very inconveniently dead = exactly my kind of vacation read. Gemma Harper's series keeps getting better, and this one is a great entry point if you haven't started yet. 👉 Grab it here →

🧁 The Main Course

Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints — Launching in 15 Days

Before Jenna McGregor had a coffee shop, a Jeep, and a habit of finding trouble in Maple Grove — she was seventeen, sitting in a high school bleacher that definitely shouldn't have been doing what it was doing.

Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints is the story I've been wanting to tell since the series began. It's the origin. The first mystery. The moment where a younger Jenna, a ragtag group of Maple Grove High classmates, and a very suspicious set of circumstances conspire to create the sleuth you've come to know across four books.

Writing it was genuinely one of my favorite things I've done in this series. Getting to go back to before — before the coffee shop, before the gang fully formed, before Jenna quite knew what she was capable of — felt like finding something I didn't know I'd been missing. I hope you feel the same way reading it.

It launches April 18th, and it's currently $0.99 in pre-order. That price doesn't stick around.

👉 Pre-order Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints now →

✍️ Behind the Scenes

With Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints launching in fifteen days, I've developed a coping strategy: stress-baking lavender scones and calling it recipe testing, which is both accurate and a convenient excuse. Charlie — my rather large, extremely opinionated cat — has taken it upon herself to sample anything left unattended on the cooling rack. I'm choosing to interpret this as a rave review.

If you'd like to try the recipe for yourself, it's straight from Jenna's kitchen — click the recipe drop-down in the header for this one and a growing collection of gluten-free favorites. No shaving cream required.

Until next week, fellow sleuths —

Willow 🌿

Meet Willow

Author, School Board member, and gluten-free baker. I write the Jenna McGregor mysteries from my home in Michigan, fueled by coffee and Peloton PRs.

Want to stay in the know? Get the Weekly Notebook

Weekly Notebook: Scones, Guest Sleuths, and Maple Grove Gossip.

🥣 The Maple Grove Update

The flour is officially flying in Maple Grove this week! Between Jenna trying to track down a 'missing' sourdough starter—which she eventually found exactly where she left it—and my own flurry of final edits for Ghosts Don't Use Blueprints (launching April 18!), the kitchen has been a bit chaotic.

I’m thrilled to see so many of you joining our 'Inner Circle.' Remember, if you’re looking for the origin of the chaos, you can grab book 1 in the series, Scones, Secrets & Sabotage, for free right here on the site! Click the purple button above and apply to become part of my Inner Circle. The book will be delivered to you within minutes. Additionally, as an Insider, you will receive special content like character videos, Mildred’s strategic notes, Lisa’s cosmic predictions, and new recipes from Jenna!

📜The Weekly Tasting Menu

While Jenna is busy dodging flour-dusted disasters, I’ve gathered five 'Guest Favorites' for your weekend reading. Each of these sleuths brings a unique flavor to the mystery table:

🔍 Guest Sleuth Spotlights

Murder, Mystery, and a Very Good Boy by A. P. Wells: A tail-wagging mystery that proves some partners are better at sniffing out clues than others.

1. Death in the Bookshop by June Hollis: Because there is nothing more dangerous (or delightful) than a mystery hidden between the stacks.

2. Murder with an Ocean View by Cheryl Marlow: A refreshing seaside escape where the only thing saltier than the air is the suspect list.

3. Murder Among Friends by Maple Quinn: Proving that sometimes, your closest inner circle is exactly where the secrets are hiding.

4. Save the Date for Murder by Vivian Keyes: A high-stakes prequel that reminds us that some dates are worth dying for.

🧁 The Main Course

Hungry for more? If you've already devoured the scones and you're ready for a second helping of mystery, Hotter than Coffee and a Killer Brew (Book 2) is waiting for you. Jenna thought the morning rush was her biggest problem, but a killer has other plans.
After a year of slinging lattes, sidestepping sabotage, and solving the occasional murder, Jenna McGregor was hoping for a season of smooth brews and zero body counts. But when a local professor turns up dead behind her café, she’s once again in the center of Maple Grove’s latest scandal.

With her (maybe) psychic best friend Lisa, retired special-ops neighbor Mildred, and a very skeptical (but frustratingly handsome) police chief, they uncover a trail of secrets leading to a suspicious puzzle club, a buried archive of incriminating documents, and a scandal involving the towns founding families.

✍️ Behind the Scenes

It’s been a week of 'tidying up' the series, much like Jenna McGregor tidies up a crime scene—though with significantly less flour involved. I’ve been mapping out the connection between the upcoming Book 0 prequel and the draft of Book 5, ensuring every clue in Maple Grove leads exactly where it should. Thank you for being part of this journey while I sift through the latest secrets!

Warmly,

Willow

Meet Willow

Author, School Board member, and gluten-free baker. I write the Jenna McGregor mysteries from my home in Michigan, fueled by coffee and Peloton PRs.

Want to stay in the know? Get the Weekly Notebook