A Murder on the Jacaranda Coast

Some places don’t wait for you to remember them.

June Rowan didn’t have a plan when she walked out on her marriage. Just a half-remembered childhood story, a name that isn’t quite her own, and a town on the Jacaranda Coast she couldn’t have pointed to on a map a year ago. Myrtle Cove is supposed to be a stopover — somewhere to catch her breath before she works out what comes next.

Instead, it feels like coming home.

June checks into The Jacaranda House, the guesthouse anchoring the town’s beloved centenary garden, and finds herself pulled into restoring it — dirt under her nails for the first time in years. But the garden’s official history doesn’t match what’s actually growing in the ground, and the journalist in her can’t leave that alone. The deeper she looks, the clearer it gets: someone rewrote this town’s past on purpose, sixty years ago, and has been tending the lie ever since.

Nobody in Myrtle Cove wants her asking questions. Not gentle, evasive Constance, who’s held this guesthouse — and maybe this secret — together for decades. Not the photographer who keeps turning up exactly where June doesn’t expect him, and who, she’ll later learn, photographed her before they’d even properly met.

The town’s most cherished story is a lie. And June — soon-to-be-divorced, broke, and armed with nothing but an old reporter’s instinct for something everyone else has learned to ignore — is the only one who’s noticed.

Book 0 in June Rowan, Restoration Mysteries — cozy garden mysteries for readers who’d rather be somewhere else, preferably somewhere with a secret buried under it.