The Ruining of the Harvest Wedding

A Highland wedding. A poisoned feast. A shopkeeper who can smell what no one else can.

In the fog-wrapped Highland village of Hearthglen, Cahdi MacLeod keeps the tea-and-books shop, pours the gossip along with the tea, and guards a family secret older than the glen itself. When the whole village gathers for the crown of the harvest festival - the wedding of her oldest friend's daughter - the last thing anyone expects is for two guests to fall dead before the dancing is done. And the frightened glen has already decided what killed them: her father's beautiful wedding cake.

As neighbors quietly cross the lane and the bakery empties by inches, Cahdi knows no magistrate from the city will save her father from a verdict the village is reaching all on its own - so she'll have to find the truth herself. Armed with a nose that misses nothing and the quiet help of Callum, the incomer schoolmaster, she pulls at a thread no one else has thought to touch: a poison that killed only two people at a feast of three hundred never came from any shared dish. It came to those two alone - and when the trail runs cold on two feet, Cahdi has ways of walking it on four.

But the harvest faire is already coming down, its visitors loading their carts for the road, and when the last stall rolls out the truth may roll out with it. The bailie has fixed on the wrong man, the real hand behind the poisoning is slipping toward the horizon, and the only witnesses Cahdi trusts are ones she can never put before a court. Can she sniff out a killer who smells of nothing but grief before an innocent man is ruined - or will Hearthglen bury the truth along with its dead?

A fair-play whodunit wrapped in Highland folklore, a slow-burn romance, and a found family with a secret to keep. Clean cozy - no gore, no grim, just tea, gossip, and a puzzle you can solve alongside her.

In Hearthglen, the tea is strong, the cats are not entirely cats, and nobody stays a stranger for very long.