Paws, Proof and Murder: A Mavis Vale Cozy Mystery (Vale Apothecary Series)
By Aalis Durant
A dead writer. A long-buried drowning. And a mill holding secrets someone will murder to keep hidden.
Mavis Vale has learned that inheriting her aunt’s apothecary comes with more than herbs and old recipes. She can sense the dead, and when an obnoxious local-history writer is found facedown in the pond by the old mill, his fading spirit leaves her with a single clue: Larkin.
That name pulls Mavis into a twenty-six-year-old drowning, her aunt’s one unsolved mystery, and a web of secrets the town has protected for decades.
There’s grouchy former mill worker Silas Redfern, caught threatening Sedgwick beside the pond, and innkeeper Margaret Hurst, whom Sedgwick was blackmailing and who secretly met him the night he died.
With help from three meddling grannies, a young gardener with a touch of magic, and one very opinionated orange cat, Mavis starts digging into the past.
But someone is desperate to recover what was hidden in the mill, and Mavis has just put herself directly in the killer’s path.
A dead writer. A long-buried drowning. And a mill holding secrets someone will murder to keep hidden.
Mavis Vale has learned that inheriting her aunt’s apothecary comes with more than herbs and old recipes. She can sense the dead, and when an obnoxious local-history writer is found facedown in the pond by the old mill, his fading spirit leaves her with a single clue: Larkin.
That name pulls Mavis into a twenty-six-year-old drowning, her aunt’s one unsolved mystery, and a web of secrets the town has protected for decades.
There’s grouchy former mill worker Silas Redfern, caught threatening Sedgwick beside the pond, and innkeeper Margaret Hurst, whom Sedgwick was blackmailing and who secretly met him the night he died.
With help from three meddling grannies, a young gardener with a touch of magic, and one very opinionated orange cat, Mavis starts digging into the past.
But someone is desperate to recover what was hidden in the mill, and Mavis has just put herself directly in the killer’s path.