She came home to start over. Someone picked opening week to commit murder.
Tess Byrne traded burnout for a fresh start: turning her late aunt's shuttered storefront into Harlow Cove's first cat café, where the coffee is real and every cat is adoptable. Eleven days in, she finds the town's most-resented man dead in the alley behind her café—face-down in a burst sack of her house blend.
The police like Ruth Deng for it—the launderette owner who is Tess's last link to her aunt. The police are wrong. Tess reads bodies for a living, and this one is telling her a different story. Her only witness? Chowder, the café's un-adoptable tomcat, who has taken a hard dislike to exactly one of the neighbors stopping by to help.
Half the street swears Chowder always knows.
A clever (never magic) cat, a warm working harbor town, and a sleuth who fixes everyone but herself.
