Sour Cherry Summer: a Cozy Small-Town Mystery with Sweet Slow-Burn Romance

The wall came down easy. What was behind it did not.Pru Ambrose came home to Tamarack Bay with two friends, one restaurant-grade oven and a lease on a lakeside dance hall that has been dark since before she was born. Six weeks to opening. Then her sledgehammer goes through a false wall in the cellar, and the Rosewater Pavilion gives up a man everybody agreed had left town in 1998.Ike Renner red-tags the building before lunch. He is the county building inspector, the volunteer fire chief, and the last man in Michigan who will bend a rule for anybody - not since the fire he signed off on six years ago. He is also, unfortunately, required to be on Pru's site every single morning until the survey is done.The state police have a backlog. The sheriff has one deputy. Nobody is in a hurry except the woman whose entire summer is nailed to a red tag - so Pru starts asking the questions herself: about a ferry that never ran, a notary stamp with the wrong date, and a watch in the historical society's display case that a dead man was wearing when he disappeared.Somebody in Tamarack Bay has spent twenty-eight years being liked. And they are not going to stop now.Sour Cherry Summer is a closed-door small-town romance with a cold case at its heart: slow burn, grumpy sunshine, forced proximity, found family, and a happily-ever-after that arrives in a gravel turnaround forty feet from the water.Tamarack Bay, Book One. No graphic content. No cliffhanger. Happy ending guaranteed.