Steeped in Secrets

In Marigold Bay, the tea is warm and the past is anything but buried.

Spring has come to the little harbor town of Marigold Bay: the window boxes are going in, and the fishing fleet is dressing its boats for the Blessing. Then an old woman down from the city walks into grief counselor Maeve Calloway's death café carrying an envelope with a familiar name on it. Eleanor Calloway. Maeve's late grandmother.

Beatrice Harkness has come about her sister Meg, who everyone agrees ran off from Marigold Bay forty-two years ago. Everyone but Nan, who never believed it. Days later a renovation turns up what was left of Meg in a cottage garden, Beatrice is found dead in her rented room, and a comfortable old story begins coming apart in Maeve's hands.

To find who killed the woman who trusted her, Maeve must reopen a grief the town buried decades ago, keep the one promise that makes her café worth having, and investigate the last person she can bear to doubt: her own grandmother.

Steeped in Secrets is the third Death Café Mystery: a warm, twisty, fair-play cozy about small towns with long memories, the comfortable stories we tell to avoid a grief, and the truths that steep in the dark for forty years.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Small-town, seaside cozy mysteries with a close-knit recurring cast
• A warm, wry amateur sleuth and a slow-burn detective
• Cold-case mysteries, fair-play clues, an emotional heart, and no gore
• Louise Penny's Three Pines, Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, and the cozies of Ellery Adams and Jenn McKinlay

The first rule of a death café is that nobody dies. It keeps not holding.

Pour a cup and pull up a chair. The Snug is open, and the marigolds are out.