The Winter Guest’s Last Dream

A dead woman’s warning. A name erased for three hundred years. And something in the walls that only feeds while you sleep.

Three months ago, Amelia Glass wrote advertising copy in a glass tower forty floors above a city where the worst thing that happened was a deadline. Now she owns a twenty-room inn in Ashvale, Connecticut, a grey cat with opinions, and a magic she can barely hold steady.

December comes in hard. Frost forms on the windows in spirals no weather could draw. Footsteps cross the second-floor hallway at 3:14 every morning and stop outside Room 12 — and the temperature there drops thirty degrees in ten seconds, then climbs back like nothing happened. In her late aunt’s hidden room, fresh pencil marks appear on a map of the curse’s boundary, in the handwriting of a woman who has been dead since September.

Then a guest arrives for Room 12. Professor Genevieve Tallow booked it six months ago — before Elizabeth died — and she has come with twelve boxes of colonial court records and forty years of expertise. Four days later she is found in bed with her hands arranged too neatly on the coverlet, a cup of tea she never ordered gone cold on the nightstand.

The sheriff is hunting a poisoner. Amelia is hunting something older — a name struck out of the historical record so violently the paper tore, hidden in her aunt’s coded journals behind a cipher that answers to nothing but warmth.

Specifically, to the warmth of a baker’s hands.

Gideon Vetch leaves lavender-honey scones on her counter every morning and has never once asked her for anything. He hears the dead. He has carried it alone since childhood, because everyone he has ever told has left. And he is the only person in Ashvale who can help her read what Elizabeth spent thirty years hiding.

To end a curse cast in 1693, Amelia will have to stand in the clearing where it was born and say a name out loud — while the family that cast it still runs the town council, still smiles at her across the hearing room, and has been feeding the thing in the ground for three hundred years.

Some inheritances come with a house.

This one came with a war.

The Winter Guest’s Last Dream is the second Hearthwood Inn Mystery — a cozy paranormal whodunnit with a haunted inn, a small town that has agreed not to ask questions, a found family assembling itself one river stone and one night log at a time, and a slow-burn romance conducted almost entirely in bread. It can be read on its own.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Small-town New England mysteries with a supernatural thread
• Slow-burn romance 
• Witchy inheritances, coded journals, and grimoires with margin notes
• Found family, town politics, and a cat who is unquestionably in charge
• Cozy mysteries with real teeth