Fair Tea and Foxglove

A tea shop she never wanted. A cat who talks back. A dead man in the corn maze. Welcome to Hollow Oak.

Maggie Thistlewood spent fourteen years catching liars for a Boston insurance company. Then the job ended, the marriage ended, and her great-aunt Ida died and left her a tea-and-book shop with a blue door in a Berkshire hill town she hadn't seen since she was nine.

The shop comes with two hundred and twelve tins of tea, a recipe the whole town expects her to brew for the Pumpkin Fair, and Bartholomew: a black cat who claims to be two hundred and six years old, speaks like a disappointed butler, and informs her, at two in the morning, that she is a hedge witch and always has been.

Maggie doesn't believe him. Until opening night, when the most hated man in Hollow Oak drinks from his flask, walks into the corn maze, and never walks out, and Maggie kneels in the grass beside him and smells the one thing that shouldn't be there.

The town thinks it was Ida's tea. The police chief thinks Maggie is a witness with a nose and a bad week. And every suspect with a motive has someone standing beside them from seven to eight, while the one person nobody would suspect was standing eighteen inches from the flask the whole time.

Fair Tea and Foxglove is Book 1 of the Hollow Oak Cozy Mysteries: a short paranormal cozy mystery, about thirty thousand words, an evening's read. A small town, a talking cat, a slow-burn police chief who drinks his tea black, and a whodunit you can actually solve. Every clue is on the page before the reveal. There is only one answer.

Perfect for readers of paranormal cozy mysteries and witch cozy mystery series who like their witches practical, their cats opinionated, and their murders fair. The series continues in Toffee and Yew.