Secrets Don’t Always Stay Buried in the Garden.
In the sleepy town of Silvergrove, keenly observant puzzle-solver Aileen Brannigan finds solace among her flowers and customers at Brannigan’s Bloomers — a vibrant garden center she's lovingly nurtured after her divorce. When the town's serenity is shattered by the murder of parolee Ethan, found face-down on a pastor’s fresh grave, Aileen must peel back layers of a mystery far more chilling than she ever guessed.
Ethan may have been a petty burglar, jailed for stealing a priceless red jade cat from the notorious Boucheron family six years earlier, but his death opens a Pandora’s box of secrets that threatens the entire town. With rumors swirling around Val Boucheron, the town’s tarnished playgirl, and her enigmatic chauffeur, Trey Spalding —suspected of leading the town’s criminal underbelly together — Aileen is thrust into the center of the rush to catch the lawbreakers.
The stakes rise when her beloved garden center is vandalized, leaving Aileen’s sidekick, Rick, injured and their dreams of floral harmony in jeopardy. As she assembles a team of eager teens armed with enthusiasm and determination, hidden thorns emerge among the flowers. With mystery budding around every corner and danger lurking in the shadows, Aileen must piece together the puzzle before time runs out. Will she uncover the killer before the petals fall?
Join Aileen in this lighthearted yet thrilling mystery where every flower holds a secret, and the blooming intrigue will make you long for a bouquet of justice, expertly arranged in every chapter.
In Small Towns, the Deepest Roots are Often Tangled In Secrets.
Garden center owner Aileen Brannigan has finally found her footing in the small Texas town of Silvergrove. With her business expanding and a team of local teens under her wing, things are looking up. Until broken ground reveals long-buried bones.
When excavation for a controversial supermarket development unearths two bodies, Aileen reluctantly steps into her role as amateur detective once again. The victims — a teenage girl, Dana Mitchell, and a teacher, Camden Matheson, who disappeared four years earlier — stir up painful memories throughout the town, especially for Mayor Tamryn Mitchell, who has been Aileen's closest friend since her arrival in Silvergrove.
As Aileen and her teen detectives dig through layers of corruption, blackmail, and small-town politics, they uncover a trail leading to the last place Aileen wants to look — the mayor's home. With crime figures threatening her investigation and her own unresolved family wounds mirroring the case, Aileen must decide what matters more: friendship or justice.
In this second Brannigan Mysteries novel, Aileen discovers that bringing truth to light means first confronting the darkness in her own heart.
A Dead Singer. A Framed Teen. A Gardener Who Grows the Truth.
When a murder disrupts the peaceful life of Silvergrove, florist and amateur sleuth Aileen Brannigan is determined to uncover the truth in "Blue Iris." The murder of Iris Jonelle Leigh after a performance at The Rusty Nail sends shock waves through the town, and Aileen's teen friend and part-time employee Garrett quickly finds himself painted as the prime suspect. With his reputation and freedom on the line, Aileen can’t sit back and watch as the investigation spirals into chaos. Aileen and her team of eager, capable teens delve deep into Iris's life, connecting the dots between her ambitions, vulnerabilities, and the dark undercurrents linked to Brady Cartwright, the new owner of local music venues. She realizes that the murder isn’t just an isolated tragedy; it's a thread connecting a series of sinister events threatening the community she loves. Tensions rise as old wounds are reopened within her fractured family, especially her estrangement with her daughter, Mavourneen. With the unwavering support of friends and a diverse cast of town characters, Aileen gathers every clue, weaving together Iris’s last days and the dangers she unknowingly faced. As Aileen races against the clock to exonerate Garrett, rescue her daughter, and confront the real killer hiding in the shadows, she discovers that some secrets refuse to stay buried. In a gripping reveal of events, Aileen must harness her knowledge of the community and the power of friendship in a thrilling quest to find justice not only for Iris but for her friend — and ultimately for herself.
The Poetry was Bad. The Murder was Worse.
In the small town of Silvergrove, Aileen Brannigan knows that beneath the picturesque surface, secrets bloom like her prized flowers. When she and her daughter Mavourneen join the local poetry club, they find themselves witnesses to more than bad verse: they stumble upon murder.
The Poetry Pioneers' president Fulvia Gramble had a knack for tearing apart poems and poets alike. When she's found dead behind The Drowsy Poet during a January meeting, her cutting critiques are silenced forever. With Fulvia's cell phone, purse, and car mysteriously missing, and no obvious cause of death, the case is as enigmatic as the victim herself.
Between running Brannigan's Bloomers and mending her strained relationship with Mavourneen, Aileen can't help but notice the details others miss. Was Fulvia's death connected to the mysterious phone call she took? Did someone in the club harbor deeper resentment than they showed? And what secrets might be hidden in the poems themselves?
As Valentine's Day approaches, Aileen must sift through layers of deception and rivalry to find a killer who turned poetry night into a crime scene. In a case where everyone has a verse to share but no one tells the whole story, Aileen discovers that in Silvergrove, the deadliest passions often hide behind the prettiest words.
Love is Blooming in Silvergrove. So is Danger.
Garden center owner Aileen Brannigan just wanted one quiet evening: a Vietnamese cooking class at Saigon Spice, a break from the flower shop, maybe a little time with her daughter. Instead, she watches a fellow student collapse mid-meal, convulsing and gone before anyone can help him.
Police Chief Roland Couch doesn’t need long to decide who’s responsible. He arrests Hanh Lam, the class’s young Vietnamese-American instructor, on the spot. She has access to the food, an unfamiliar name, and, unspoken but unmistakable, the wrong kind of foreign. Officer Delilah Ellis objects. Aileen objects louder. Neither one is in charge.
So Aileen does what she’s done multiple times before in Silvergrove: she builds a case of her own. Her lawyer daughter, Mavourneen, takes on Hanh’s defense, with unexpected federal complications waiting in the wings. Her loyal crew of teenage employees, including a hacker with more nerve than sense, a musician with a sharp ear for lies, a surveillance-minded fixer, and more, turn the Bloomers break room into command central.
What they find rewrites the case. The victim wasn’t a carpenter: he was a federal investigator closing the books on Vietnam-era financial crimes with no statute of limitations. The poison wasn’t something anyone could pick up at a nursery; it took real botanical knowledge to source. And the deeper Aileen digs, the further back the trail runs: fifty years, to a refugee resettlement camp, a fortune stolen from people who had already lost everything once, and a secret quietly propping up half of Silvergrove’s most respected families ever since.
Someone in town has spent five decades making sure that secret stayed buried. And the aren’t finished protecting it. As Vietnamese-American families across Silvergrove face threats, vandalism, and the real possibility of leaving for good, Aileen realizes the truth may cost her more than she’s ever paid, in friendships, in safety, and in the town’s fragile idea of itself.
The water off Puerto Rico's northeast coast is the exact cerulean the postcards promise. It is not, this week, telling the truth about what happened to the man who washed up on its sand.
White Sand, Red Blood opens a new Caribbean crime series with a body that shouldn't be as simple as San Juan Metro wants it to be. ICTF investigators Sol Batiste and Dev Reyes-Wright — one running on instinct, one on procedure, both freshly and reluctantly paired — follow a dead man's second identity from a working-class Ponce street to a gleaming Nassau marina to a Curaçao office where the paperwork gets colder the closer it gets to the truth.
Underneath the postcard is a land-grab: a mega-resort developer buying up a coastline one quiet sale at a time, and a fixer who made the mistake of knowing exactly how it worked. Underneath the funding board's calm reviews is a task force that might not survive the month.
Sun-drenched suspense with real procedural rigor — a Caribbean setting doing more than decorating the crime scene, and a mystery that plays fair to the last page.
She Runs a Food Pantry. She Didn't Expect to Run an Investigation...
Mel Hunter has run The Giving Spoon for four years. She knows how to manage a shortage, keep a team steady, and get more done before nine in the morning than most people manage all day.
She didn’t expect to spend October solving a murder.
When chess master Bernard Travers is killed by a bee swarm during the town's annual tournament, the official explanation doesn’t satisfy Mel — and when her friend Arthur Pumble, the local beekeeper, is arrested on circumstantial evidence, she has no choice but to look deeper. What she finds is a mystery built from queen pheromones, a touch-move chess rule, and a grievance so old and so documented it has its own archive box.
Warm, wry, and set in the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone’s business until the moment they don’t, Dead to Rites introduces Mel Hunter: community anchor, reluctant detective, and the most dangerous thing in Possum Gap — a practical woman who has decided something isn’t right.
The First Book of a New Series, Available Now on Amazon!
She Came for a Fresh Start. The Mountains Had Other Plans...
Jean Hudson drove west with nothing but a baker’s instincts and the quiet determination to stop being someone’s ex-wife. A temporary job at Bald Mountain Lodge seemed like exactly the kind of clean beginning she needed: a remote Colorado mountain resort, a chess tournament full of strangers, and nobody who knew her name.
Then the blizzard arrived. Riley McHenry — fifteen years old, a prodigy, the kind of chess talent that comes along once in a generation — vanished from his room in the night.
Then the first body turned up.
Jean doesn’t know chess. But she knows how to read a room, how to listen to what isn’t said, and how to recognize when someone is feeding her a story instead of the truth. As the storm tightens its grip on the lodge and the suspects multiply, Jean finds herself drawn deeper into a conspiracy of coded game transcripts, match-fixing, and murder that has been building for years.
She came to Bald Mountain Lodge to start over. She’s going to have to solve a murder first.
A Recipe for Checkmate is the first novel in the Jeanine Hudson Mystery series, Available Now on Amazon!
The Clearer You See, The Deadlier It Becomes
The Guild of Spektacle Makers crafts lenses that enhance human perception beyond natural limits. In 1890s Oxonia, these magical spectacles grant their wearers extraordinary sight—until that enhanced vision becomes a death sentence.
Detective Ava Quilling's own enchanted spectacles have made her the Constabulary's most effective investigator. When guild members begin dying in their locked workshops, she expects another straightforward magical crime. Instead, she finds murders that shouldn't be possible: victims killed without physical contact, their protective spectacles intact, their faces frozen in expressions of absolute terror.
Each death is more elaborate than the last, orchestrated by someone who understands optical magic better than the masters themselves. The killer manipulates perception , guiding victims into death traps through their own enhanced sight. As guild members live in fear, Ava races to understand how someone can murder through manipulation of reality itself.
But the closer she gets to the truth, the more she realises that her investigation might be exactly what the killer has been waiting for. With her own enhanced vision marking her as either the perfect pursuer or the ultimate prey, Ava must solve the case before she becomes its final victim.
The First Book of a New Series, Available Now on Amazon!