Hemlock and Heartache

By Emma Holloway

A market-day poisoning. A forty-year forager who never once got a root wrong. And a whole town ready to blame her memory instead of the truth.

By midsummer, Ivy Sutter has almost gotten used to a season that doesn't involve a body, right up until Hazel Boone, the beloved elder of Bramblewick Harbor's Saturday farmers' market, turns up dead the morning after closing, killed by the one root every forager in the county is trained to fear on sight. The kind of mistake, everyone agrees, that happens to careless amateurs. Never to Hazel.

The county's ready to call it exactly what it looks like: an old woman's failing memory finally catching up with her. Even Hazel's own daughter is half-convinced it's true, and half-consumed by guilt for not seeing it sooner. But Ivy has spent nine years learning the difference between an honest mistake and a staged one, and this poisoning doesn't read like either, it reads like someone counting on this whole town to believe a lifetime of hard-won expertise simply ran out, right on schedule.

To find out who, Ivy will have to work her way through a bitter, years-long market rivalry, a grieving daughter's own carefully guarded secret, and the quiet, desperate reasons good people in a small, struggling community sometimes decide someone else's silence is worth more than their life. And with her own future in Bramblewick Harbor, and with the sheriff who's become the steadiest thing in it, quietly on the line all summer long, Ivy has more reason than ever to get this one exactly right.

Some roots run bitter all the way down.

Book Three of The Elemental Mysteries.

Emma Holloway

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HBKLXHFC
• ISBN13: 9798188936556
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"