Still Waters at Kettner Lake
(2026)(The fifth book in the Paws in the Pines Mystery series)
A novel by Hailey Hartley
Estate attorney Margot Lund didn't come to Kettner Lake looking for trouble — she came for the quiet. Two weeks in a rented cabin, a case file she was absolutely not going to open, and nothing more demanding than long walks along the shoreline with her border collie, Pip. It was a reasonable plan, right up until she arrived to find that her family's annual gathering was already underway at the main cabin, complete with a long-estranged relative nobody had mentioned, and the particular tension that settles over a house when old business has finally come to a head.
When one of the guests is found dead and the first read is natural causes, Margot isn't so sure ''' and neither is Pip, who has staked out a spot in the east hallway and shows absolutely no intention of moving. Deputy Lyle Cauley arrives from the Brackman County substation stretched thin and skeptical, but when he realizes that Margot reads a room the way other people read a clock, and that her pocket notebook contains entries timestamped to the minute, he decides that unofficial help is better than no help at all. As the investigation quietly assembles itself around preserved jars, property documents, and a family secret thirty years in the making, Margot finds herself doing what she does best: following the architecture of a thing until she finds the piece that doesn't fit.
Still Waters at Kettner Lake is a warm, precise, and thoroughly satisfying cozy mystery — the fifth installment in the Paws in the Pines series — set on the shores of a glacier-carved mountain lake where the November cold is sharp, the coffee is always on, and a very deliberate border collie has been paying attention since long before anyone thought to ask what he'd noticed.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
When one of the guests is found dead and the first read is natural causes, Margot isn't so sure ''' and neither is Pip, who has staked out a spot in the east hallway and shows absolutely no intention of moving. Deputy Lyle Cauley arrives from the Brackman County substation stretched thin and skeptical, but when he realizes that Margot reads a room the way other people read a clock, and that her pocket notebook contains entries timestamped to the minute, he decides that unofficial help is better than no help at all. As the investigation quietly assembles itself around preserved jars, property documents, and a family secret thirty years in the making, Margot finds herself doing what she does best: following the architecture of a thing until she finds the piece that doesn't fit.
Still Waters at Kettner Lake is a warm, precise, and thoroughly satisfying cozy mystery — the fifth installment in the Paws in the Pines series — set on the shores of a glacier-carved mountain lake where the November cold is sharp, the coffee is always on, and a very deliberate border collie has been paying attention since long before anyone thought to ask what he'd noticed.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Hailey Hartley's Still Waters at Kettner Lake