Tessa's Nose for Trouble A Mulberry Mystery — Book One

Some towns keep their secrets buried deep. In Mulberry, Vermont, secrets have a way of finding Hannah Douglas first.

Hannah came to Mulberry four years ago with a carload of secondhand furniture and a dream. Now she runs the Cozy Wick, a candle shop on Main Street that smells like cedar and something sweet, and on Thursday evenings she hosts the four women who have quietly become the center of her world.

Then one February morning her dachshund Tessa goes absolutely still on the town hall steps, and nothing in Mulberry is the same again.

When a prominent selectwoman is found dead at the bottom of a staircase, the official verdict is accidental fall. But Tessa's nose never lies. And Hannah has learned to trust it.

Following a trail of forged land records, a missing candlestick, and a crystal pendant found in the gravel of a parking lot, Hannah pieces together a truth that breaks her heart. Because the person Tessa has been watching all along is someone Hannah loves. Someone who sat at her Thursday table for two years and poured candles and said the exactly right thing and was, in every way that mattered, her friend.

With a by-the-book state detective closing in, a slow-burn romance with the town mechanic who has been showing up at her back door for fourteen months, and a dog who refuses to pretend she doesn't know what she knows, Hannah must follow this one all the way to its end.

Even when the end is the hardest thing she has ever done.

Perfect for readers who love small-town cozy mysteries with animal sleuths, slow-burn romance, and the kind of community that stays with you long after the last page.