Book 1 · Available for Preorder
The Soapmaker’s Familiar
She came to Wales looking for her ancestry. She found a new home, an old murder—and a cat who could talk.
After a painful breakup and a surprising discovery about her family history, American master soapmaker Elaine Bellamy travels to the coastal Welsh village of Trefalen. There she finds Vaughan’s Soapworks: a shuttered shop with a professional workshop, a walled botanical garden, and enough potential to persuade her to move across the Atlantic and begin again.
The property also comes with Misty, a green-eyed tortoiseshell possessing equal measures of sweetness, attitude, and opinions. Opinions she expresses out loud.
Misty was the familiar of Lowri Vaughan, the soapworks’ late owner and the keeper of a magical craft tradition embedded in the shop’s well-used tools. Elaine has barely begun settling into her new life when Carys Maddock—a heritage-business consultant with a complicated connection to Lowri—arrives asking unwelcome questions. Then Carys is murdered.
With suspicion creeping toward her new doorstep and nearly everyone connected to the soapworks concealing something, Elaine begins asking questions of her own. Her twenty-five years of soapmaking experience have taught her to observe materials, follow processes, and notice when something in a carefully constructed story does not belong.
DI Iwan Meredith would prefer that Elaine leave the investigation to the police. Misty would prefer that the police work faster. But when clues point toward Lowri’s hidden past, Elaine must uncover which secrets concern old craft magic—and which provide a very human motive for murder.
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