Hi reader,

It is not quite fall yet, but it is close enough that I have started reaching for the witchy shelf again, and I want to talk about the book on it that I don't think gets enough air time.

Something Wicked This Way Brews is the first Crestwick Chronicles book, and it has been out seven weeks now, which means it is exactly the kind of thing you can start tonight and be three books deep by Halloween, because the sequel exists too. Harriet Godwin runs the best herbal tea shop in a small town called Crestwick and has exactly one rule about the magic she keeps quiet: it doesn't cause problems, and it is nobody's business. That rule survives right up until she finds beloved old Professor Aldous Bright dead on the bench outside her shop, killed by magic old enough and specific enough that only someone with her own secret could have done it. Which means the killer is someone in her own town, who has no idea what they have just done, and Harriet is the only person who can tell the difference between an accident and a murder that looks like one. Her cat, Fig, was already waiting on the doorstep the morning she found the body. He always knows first.

I want to give you Fig properly, though, because the newsletter blurb never has room for him, and he deserves better. Two years before the book opens, Harriet arrived in Crestwick meaning to sell the shop she'd inherited and be gone by summer. She had the whole speech prepared about not being the sort of woman who gets attached to places. Then this happened, on her first afternoon in an empty building she had every intention of leaving:

"I did not let him in. I want that on the record too. The door was shut. I had not propped it, had not so much as cracked it for the cold air, and yet when I turned around from the hob there was a cat on the inside windowsill, gray as a held breath, sitting with his tail curled over his feet and his eyes on me with the flat, ancient patience of an auditor who has found a discrepancy and is prepared to wait all afternoon for me to find it too.

"This is not my cat," I told the empty shop.

The cat blinked, slowly, in a way that did not concede the point."

That whole scene is a bonus prequel called "The First Pot," and it exists, finished, right now. Reply with the word FIG and I will send it to you. It is Harriet's actual first afternoon in Crestwick, two years before the mystery, and it tells you everything about how she ended up exactly where she swore she wouldn't stay.

The giveaway is still open. One free ebook of Feathers and Phantoms, Book Three of the Winifred Baxter Mysteries. To enter, reply to this email and answer one question: who would make the better mystery-solving partner, a watchful ghost or an evidence-stealing crow? Entries close 11:59 p.m. Mountain Time on September 30, I pick one winner at random, and I email them October 2. No purchase necessary. If you already answered last week, you are in; one entry each.

If witches aren't your season and detectives are, the Winifred Baxter Mysteries are the other cozy shelf, and the second book's killer-reveal letter is here if you want the case for it. Last week's letter laid out the reading order for both thriller series, in case you missed it, here. And if you'd rather start cold with a thriller, the entire first chapter of The Echo Man is free on the site, no signup required, here.

The ask. If any of these landed for you, an honest review in the first weeks does more for a small press than almost anything else I can ask for.

And if you would rather read me early and free from now on, join Read It First and tick the Jessie Clark box.

Worth a listen this week. The house podcast is Story Worlds, on YouTube, opening with "Every Book Is a Doorway." A witch who inherits a shop she doesn't want to keep and ends up keeping it anyway is more or less that argument with fur on it. Watch here or subscribe to the channel here.

One honest question. When the season turns, do you reach for something cozy or something twisty first? I go cozy every single year and I am starting to suspect that says something about me. Hit reply.

Happy reading,

Jessie Clark

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