the Bitter Taste of Honey: What Bees Remember

Everyone in Mercy Creek trusts Miss Bea.Her honey is raw, fresh, and considered the finest in the county. It sits on breakfast tables, fills restaurant kitchens, and appears in nearly every gift basket the town gives. So when respected physician Malcolm Price collapses during the annual Honey and Harvest Festival, the broken jar beneath his chair means nothing.Then another person dies.And another.Sheriff Callie Reed cannot find a connection between the victims. They come from different worlds, lead different lives, and share no obvious enemy. The only common thread is so ordinary no one wants to consider it evidence: each victim received a jar of Bea Bell's honey.Laboratory results reveal the impossible truth. Selected jars were deliberately poisoned-and the beloved widow who made them may have been waiting eighteen years to settle an old debt.As Callie uncovers the story of Bea's son Daniel, a veteran whose death was dismissed as a drunken accident, the investigation reaches into Mercy Creek's most powerful families-and her own father's celebrated legacy. Someone buried the truth the night Daniel died. Now the people who helped conceal it are dying one by one.But when a second killer begins copying Bea's deadly signature, Callie must separate vengeance from justice before the final jar is delivered.In a town built on sweetness, the truth has been bitter all along.