A Fatal Bloom

By Emma Holloway

A cup of tea. A dead man in the town square.
And exactly one week left before Ivy Sutter meant to be gone for good.

She only came back to Bramblewick Harbor to bury her aunt Rosalind and unload the century-old apothecary she never asked to inherit, a shop full of unlabeled tinctures, unpaid IOUs, and Beaker, a deeply unimpressed cat who seemed to be judging her already. Settle the estate, sell the Tinctorium, go home. Simple.

Then the festival chairman collapses in the middle of Founders' Day, moments after finishing a cup of tea poured from Ivy's own table. The town calls it a heart attack. Ivy knows better the instant she sees his eyes - that particular grey that nine years of toxicology had taught her to recognize.

The trail leads straight back to a jar on her aunt's own shelf, relabeled and hidden in plain sight weeks before Ivy ever came home. Worse, the closer she looks, the less she believes Rosalind's own death was the accident everyone assumed.

Now Ivy has to do the one thing she swore she'd never do again: trust her training over the official story. That means convincing a skeptical sheriff who doesn't buy her science, and can't quite stop noticing her either. It means earning the trust of a town that isn't sure it wants her there. And it means catching a killer who was patient enough to wait months for exactly the right moment.

One week. One shop. One very inconvenient body count.

Book One of The Elemental Mysteries.

Emma Holloway

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8YNSF9N
• ISBN13: 9798187117246
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 92 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"