Steep Until Dead

A murder. A tea shop. A 214-year-old vampire who notices everything.

The Vesper Cup opens at seven. In the evening. Victoria Voss has run her tea shop in the foggy coastal town of Hollowfen for nearly five decades, serving an unusual clientele: the undead, the long-lived, hedge-witches, shapeshifters, and the things the moon has opinions about. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary establishment. Victoria prefers it that way.

Cornelius Ashby has occupied Chair Seven every Thursday for thirty-seven years. He holds forth at length. He has strong opinions about marsh boundary disputes, attribution errors in obscure academic journals, and the correct number of sugars in a blood-orange rooibos. He is, in Victoria's estimation, a magnificent inconvenience.

On a Thursday in October, Victoria steps into the back room for a rag.

She comes back to find Chair Seven occupied only by ash.

Victoria is not a detective. But she is a meticulous observer with two centuries of practice, a notebook containing everything she has ever noticed about everyone who has walked through her door, and a nose that can catalogue a room like a card index. She has the ash, the teacup, the pocket watch - still ticking - and a threatening note she can't yet place.

What she doesn't have is the name of whoever knew her shop well enough to turn it into a crime scene.

As she works through her community of suspects - a zombie antiques dealer with a guilty conscience, a six-hundred-year-old banshee who knew more than she said, a shapeshifter who won't give his name, and a charming former vampire hunter she has never quite trusted - the investigation reaches into a forty-year academic theft, a stolen manuscript, and a ruined chapel on the marsh where someone is keeping secrets she can't afford to ignore.

Steep Until Dead is the first book in the Hollowfen Paranormal Mysteries - a gothic-cozy series set in a foggy English coastal town where the tea is always right and the dead, occasionally, have a point to make.

For readers who like their mysteries fair-play, their atmosphere thick, and their investigators immortal.