Toffee and Yew

The oak was never supposed to burn. Then a man with two million followers brought fireworks.

A year after the cider stand, Maggie Thistlewood has settled into Hollow Oak: forty teas of her own on the wall, a police chief who drinks his black, and a two-hundred-and-seven-year-old cat who claims to have done most of the work. Then Marcus Bellweather rolls into town with a camera crew, a trailer the size of a house, and a plan to open the church's 1743 Covenant live at midnight on Halloween, right after his famous on-air bite of a toffee apple.

The minister says no. Nana Hadley says fill the big urn. And at midnight, in front of the whole town and two million phones, the wind turns, the oak catches fire, and Marcus Bellweather bites an apple that kills him within the hour.

Everyone saw the bite. Nobody saw the poison. The apple came from a bag that its owner swears has never left her shoulder, and the town has already decided it came from the girl at the toffee stand instead.

Maggie has a nose, a friend with a newspaper, a chief with a notebook, and eight days until the dark of the moon, when something under the oak expects to be answered. And she has one contradiction, stated plainly, that only the killer needed her to believe.

Toffee and Yew is the second Hollow Oak Witch Cozy Mystery: a fair-play whodunit you can solve before the reveal, a slow-burn romance that finally gets a dinner reservation, and a talking cat who is, for once, not the oldest thing on the green.

Each Hollow Oak mystery stands on its own. Start here, or start with Fair Tea and Foxglove.