She came to Myrtle Cove to catch her breath. It caught her instead.
June Rowan walked out of her marriage with no plan, no map, and no idea what came next—just a half-remembered childhood story and the pull of a small town on the Jacaranda Coast. Myrtle Cove was only ever meant to be a place to stop and breathe.
Instead, it feels like the home she didn't know she'd lost.
Broke, her divorce not yet final, and quietly certain her best years are behind her, June takes a room at The Jacaranda House and finds herself pulled into restoring its beloved centenary garden. It's the first thing that's felt like hers in years. But the garden's official history doesn't match what's growing in the ground—and the journalist she used to be can't let that go. Someone rewrote this town's past sixty years ago. Someone has been quietly tending the lie ever since.
Nobody in Myrtle Cove wants June asking. Not Constance, the gentle, evasive matriarch who's held the guesthouse—and its secrets—together for decades. And not Edmund, the maddening photographer who keeps turning up exactly where she doesn't expect him, and who caught something in her, in a single unguarded second, that she'd long stopped believing anyone would ever see.
Because the town's most cherished story is a lie. A woman was written out of it on purpose, her name buried along with the truth. And June—overlooked, underestimated, armed with nothing but an old reporter's nose for the thing everyone else has agreed not to notice—is the only one left who can dig it up and set it right.
Some gardens don't give up their secrets until someone loves them enough to dig.
A Murder on the Jacaranda Coast is the free prequel to the June Rowan Restoration Mysteries: cozy, closed-door garden mysteries set in beautiful places around the world, for readers who'd rather be somewhere else—preferably somewhere with a secret buried beneath it.
Tropes:
- A fresh start at forty
- A wild garden with a buried past
- A slow burn she isn't looking for
- A cold case sixty years cold
- A found family
- A town you'll want to move to
