Steep and Bitter
(2026)(The third book in the Paws in the Pines Mystery series)
A novel by Hailey Hartley
Wilderness survival instructor Rue Hallet didn't come to Sable Creek Valley looking for trouble — she came for the paycheck and the pine trees, in that order. A colleague vouched for the work: lead backcountry trail walks for the guests at Root & Restore, a woodland detox retreat run by the silk-voiced Calder Vane, and try not to roll her eyes too visibly at the ceremonial teas and intention-setting circles. She brings her ten-year-old chocolate Lab, Beau, who has slowed down in his old age but whose nose remains, as Rue puts it, embarrassingly accurate. It's a reasonable week in the woods. Right up until the third morning, when Calder is found unresponsive on the yurt floor — and Beau plants himself beside an unwashed teacup and simply refuses to leave.
Rue knows her plants. You don't spend twenty years teaching people how not to die in the backcountry without developing a very specific respect for what grows on creek banks and what it can do. When Deputy Corwin Spade arrives from the Dunmore County Sheriff's Department, he finds a careful woman with a field notebook, a formal statement already written, and a dog who has been sitting in the same spot for an hour. As Spade works through Calder's files and Rue works through the people in them, a picture emerges of a man who was very good at making others feel indebted — and very bad at knowing when he'd pushed too far. Somewhere in this small group of guests, someone decided the debt was settled. The tea was just the method. The motive goes much deeper.
Steep and Bitter is a warm, sharp, and thoroughly satisfying cozy mystery — the third installment in the Paws in the Pines series — set in a fictional mountain valley where the coffee is always bad at the sheriff's substation, the hemlock grows right where you'd least like it to, and a very patient old Labrador is about to prove that some things can't stay buried, no matter how carefully they were mixed in.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Rue knows her plants. You don't spend twenty years teaching people how not to die in the backcountry without developing a very specific respect for what grows on creek banks and what it can do. When Deputy Corwin Spade arrives from the Dunmore County Sheriff's Department, he finds a careful woman with a field notebook, a formal statement already written, and a dog who has been sitting in the same spot for an hour. As Spade works through Calder's files and Rue works through the people in them, a picture emerges of a man who was very good at making others feel indebted — and very bad at knowing when he'd pushed too far. Somewhere in this small group of guests, someone decided the debt was settled. The tea was just the method. The motive goes much deeper.
Steep and Bitter is a warm, sharp, and thoroughly satisfying cozy mystery — the third installment in the Paws in the Pines series — set in a fictional mountain valley where the coffee is always bad at the sheriff's substation, the hemlock grows right where you'd least like it to, and a very patient old Labrador is about to prove that some things can't stay buried, no matter how carefully they were mixed in.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Hailey Hartley's Steep and Bitter