Murder Checks In

She came to sell the inn. Now she has to solve a murder to keep it.

When burned-out Boston chef Nora Marsh inherits a crumbling seaside inn from a great-aunt she barely knew, she has a plan, and it's eight words long: fix it up, sell it, be gone by July. She does not plan to fall for the foggy little town of Gull Harbor, Maine. She definitely doesn't plan to find her first guest dead in the best room two days after she arrives.

The police call it an accident. Nora knows better, because she knows food, and she knows the man who died of a shellfish allergy never touched a thing in her kitchen that could have hurt him. Someone fed him his death on purpose, on one of her own plates, and the whole town would rather believe the from-away chef did it than look at one of their own.

To clear her name and save the inn, Nora will have to learn who really runs a town this small, who's been quietly buying up its harbor, and what her sharp-eyed great-aunt was protecting when she died. With a watchful housekeeper, a loyal café owner, an indignant orange cat, and a transplant detective who's been burned the same way she has, Nora follows the one trail nobody else can read, the one that runs straight through her own kitchen.

In Gull Harbor, the kindest face in the room is the most dangerous. And the truth, like the tide, always comes back in.

Murder Checks In is the first book in the Harbor Light Inn Mysteries: cozy, food-loving, small-town whodunits with a slow-burn romance, a cast you'll want to move in with, and recipes in the back. No gore, no grim, just a warm fire and a cleverly hidden killer.

Includes two recipes from the Harbor Light kitchen.
Nora returns in A Death in High Season.