You've found your sanctuary.
Time to sip your tea and get comfy because you won't want to leave.

Roxie Maxx
Whiskey Pines, Michigan

Small Town. Big Lake. One Very Nosy Reporter.

I'm Roxie Maxx. I came back to Whiskey Pines to help my father run the Whiskey Pines Journal and possibly eat my weight in pastry at Becky Hartwell's Crumb Cottage Bakery. Simple plan. Solid plan. A plan that lasted approximately three days before someone turned up dead, my grandmother's Victorian monstrosity revealed a tunnel in the basement, and my ex-husband materialized like bad luck in a beige sweater.

Whiskey Pines sits on Lake Michigan, charm stacked on top of Prohibition-era scandal, old money on top of older grudges. It looks like a postcard. It behaves like a crime scene. I fit right in.

I write the stories. I solve the cases. I keep the coffee hot and Dut Steeplepuss III at a distance that satisfies both my restraining order and my sense of smell. My grandmother's emerald pendant has opinions about all of it, delivered without warning and usually at the worst possible moment.

This is the official home of Whiskey Pines, my books, and the ongoing disaster I call my life. You're welcome to stay. Just don't touch anything in the basement.

✦   Kenzie weighs in

She left out the part where I solve half of these cases while she's busy being sentimental over the pendant. Also the pastry situation is worse than she's admitting. I have opinions about the éclair incident and I intend to voice them at length, Kenzie sent, from the depths of a throw pillow she had no intention of vacating.

Kenzie — Bichon Frise, reincarnated speakeasy waitress, reluctant hero