Steeped in Suspicion
(2026)(The fifth book in the Teapot Tails Mystery series)
A novel by Hailey Hartley
When Mayor Clement Farrow collapses at his own birthday function, the official verdict arrives quickly and tidily: a cardiac event, a tragedy, nothing more to be done. Tearoom owner Lyra Tindall accepts the condolences, keeps the counter running, and says nothing to anyone about the thermostat on the clotted cream, the twenty minutes the function room stood empty, or the particular fact that the lemon dish was the one thing she had left in the van. Farrow had been a good mayor and a careful man, and someone in Holt Crossing had decided very deliberately that his birthday afternoon was the right moment to stop him. Lyra intends to find out who — and what, exactly, they needed to stop.
With her copper ginger tomcat Thorn keeping an unwavering watch over a cake stand that has no business being as interesting as he seems to think it is, and her sharp-eyed neighbor Agnes supplying fourteen years of civic knowledge and a very accommodating archivist, Lyra begins pulling threads that lead from a side passage that never locked from inside to a discretionary fund with a great deal of explaining to do. Between a solicitor who points her at a Monday meeting without asking a single question, a treasurer who flagged something two years ago and was quietly persuaded to forget it, and a deputy mayor whose composure has never once slipped — not at the function, not since — the picture that emerges is one of misappropriation arranged with patience, a confession that was days away from being made, and a wall that someone was not prepared to let come down. Sheriff Colby is methodical and fair, but some conclusions only form over a properly kept pot of tea.
Warm, precise, and steeped in the pleasures of a small town that keeps careful records, Steeped in Suspicion is the fifth book in the Teapot Tails series — a cozy mystery for anyone who believes that the most important evidence is the kind that waits quietly to be found, that a well-placed diary entry can be more useful than a confession, and that a clever woman, a watchful cat, and a good house blend are more than sufficient to find out what really happened on a bright June afternoon.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
With her copper ginger tomcat Thorn keeping an unwavering watch over a cake stand that has no business being as interesting as he seems to think it is, and her sharp-eyed neighbor Agnes supplying fourteen years of civic knowledge and a very accommodating archivist, Lyra begins pulling threads that lead from a side passage that never locked from inside to a discretionary fund with a great deal of explaining to do. Between a solicitor who points her at a Monday meeting without asking a single question, a treasurer who flagged something two years ago and was quietly persuaded to forget it, and a deputy mayor whose composure has never once slipped — not at the function, not since — the picture that emerges is one of misappropriation arranged with patience, a confession that was days away from being made, and a wall that someone was not prepared to let come down. Sheriff Colby is methodical and fair, but some conclusions only form over a properly kept pot of tea.
Warm, precise, and steeped in the pleasures of a small town that keeps careful records, Steeped in Suspicion is the fifth book in the Teapot Tails series — a cozy mystery for anyone who believes that the most important evidence is the kind that waits quietly to be found, that a well-placed diary entry can be more useful than a confession, and that a clever woman, a watchful cat, and a good house blend are more than sufficient to find out what really happened on a bright June afternoon.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Hailey Hartley's Steeped in Suspicion