A Retired Monster Hunter's Guide to Innkeeping 2
(2026)(The second book in the Last Inn on the Hunting Road series)
A novel by Clay Whitlock
For thirty years, Garron Pell was the last thing the monsters on the north road ever saw. These days he pours their ale.
The Last Lantern is open at last. A rebuilt inn on a feared road. House rules chalked beside the door, a garlic board worth the nine-mile walk, and a young gravewyrm that mostly believes the hardest of those rules: guests are not groceries. New to the road? Start with Book 1: A Retired Monster Hunter’s Guide to Innkeeping.
Then a frost-rimed cart comes up the road in high summer, and Garron says yes before he knows what he has said yes to.
Under the canvas sleeps a hoar-elk calf, pale as a salt block, breathing four times a minute. Its keeper is Ivet Doss, a white-haired cold-drover with rules she does not explain and a deadline she does: the calf must cross the moor line before the first hard frost wakes it. Warm air spends the cold it sleeps on. And the storm-broken road will not carry a loaded cart for weeks.
So the Last Lantern digs a cold room into the hill and learns its trade backward. The hearth is a hazard. The lantern is a risk. A full, cheerful taproom is the worst thing that can happen to his quietest guest.
Meanwhile autumn calls in every debt the summer signed. Junia takes the north wall down to the frame to build it right. Mira lays in the winter stores and plants garlic for a July she already talks about. Marrow has grown all summer and no longer fits its own door. And something small and soot-colored has been drinking the road lantern dry.
Then the rains drown the village green, and Bellwether brings its fair up the hill: sixty neighbors, a dozen cook-fires, a bonfire, and the warmest, stillest autumn night anyone can remember. Below the yard, behind a double door, sleeps one guest who cannot afford a single warm hour.
Garron spent his first season teaching a cold house to be warm. Now he has until the first frost to master the opposite, and the whole valley is coming to dinner.
A Retired Monster Hunter’s Guide to Innkeeping 2 continues the warm, clean, slow-living cozy fantasy series for readers who loved Legends & Lattes, Beware of Chicken, and The Tired Mercenary Just Wants to Farm in Peace.
What’s waiting at the Last Lantern this autumn:
The Last Lantern is open at last. A rebuilt inn on a feared road. House rules chalked beside the door, a garlic board worth the nine-mile walk, and a young gravewyrm that mostly believes the hardest of those rules: guests are not groceries. New to the road? Start with Book 1: A Retired Monster Hunter’s Guide to Innkeeping.
Then a frost-rimed cart comes up the road in high summer, and Garron says yes before he knows what he has said yes to.
Under the canvas sleeps a hoar-elk calf, pale as a salt block, breathing four times a minute. Its keeper is Ivet Doss, a white-haired cold-drover with rules she does not explain and a deadline she does: the calf must cross the moor line before the first hard frost wakes it. Warm air spends the cold it sleeps on. And the storm-broken road will not carry a loaded cart for weeks.
So the Last Lantern digs a cold room into the hill and learns its trade backward. The hearth is a hazard. The lantern is a risk. A full, cheerful taproom is the worst thing that can happen to his quietest guest.
Meanwhile autumn calls in every debt the summer signed. Junia takes the north wall down to the frame to build it right. Mira lays in the winter stores and plants garlic for a July she already talks about. Marrow has grown all summer and no longer fits its own door. And something small and soot-colored has been drinking the road lantern dry.
Then the rains drown the village green, and Bellwether brings its fair up the hill: sixty neighbors, a dozen cook-fires, a bonfire, and the warmest, stillest autumn night anyone can remember. Below the yard, behind a double door, sleeps one guest who cannot afford a single warm hour.
Garron spent his first season teaching a cold house to be warm. Now he has until the first frost to master the opposite, and the whole valley is coming to dinner.
A Retired Monster Hunter’s Guide to Innkeeping 2 continues the warm, clean, slow-living cozy fantasy series for readers who loved Legends & Lattes, Beware of Chicken, and The Tired Mercenary Just Wants to Farm in Peace.
What’s waiting at the Last Lantern this autumn:
- A retired monster slayer learning to keep one guest cold in a house built for warmth
Marrow the gravewyrm, grown too big for its own stable door and deeply offended about it
A white-haired cold-drover with hard rules, and a soot-colored thief with no shame at all
A village fair in the inn yard and an autumn garlic board sold by the plate
Light LitRPG progression through the inn’s magical Welcome Ledger
Clean, low-stakes, no harem, closed-door comfort from the first page to the last
Missed the beginning? Start with Book 1: A Retired Monster Hunter’s Guide to Innkeeping.
Read free in Kindle Unlimited.
Genre: GameLit
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Used availability for Clay Whitlock's A Retired Monster Hunter's Guide to Innkeeping 2