Festival of Death

Some traditions are meant to be preserved. Others are deadly to unearth.

Tourism Director Ellie Summers faces her biggest challenge yet: co-chairing Millcrest Falls' sesquicentennial Harvest Festival alongside Margaret Freeman, guardian of festival traditions for twenty-five years and descendant of the town's founding family.

Their uneasy partnership ends when Margaret is found drowned in the apple-bobbing barrel.

Suspicion falls on Ellie's assistant, Sabrina Townsend, whose modern ideas clashed publicly with Margaret's devotion to tradition. But Ellie knows Sabrina isn't capable of murder—and as she digs deeper, she discovers Margaret had plenty of enemies.

Margaret recently cut her nephew from her will, leaving him desperate. A decades-old rivalry with town historian Eileen May traces back to a festival scandal in 1975. And someone has been sabotaging festival preparations with increasingly dangerous "accidents."

When Ellie finds a vintage recipe book hidden in the Heritage Barn, its coded margin notes reveal a shocking truth: some of Millcrest Falls' most cherished "colonial traditions" were invented in the 1940s. Margaret was about to expose the fraud—and destroy certain families' reputations in the process.

With the festival days away and a killer growing bolder, Ellie must decode a historical conspiracy while planning a celebration that honors the past without being buried by it.

Some traditions are meant to be preserved. Others are deadly to unearth.

FESTIVAL OF DEATH is the second book in the Millcrest Falls Tourism Mystery series. Each book features a complete, standalone mystery while building the relationships readers will follow throughout the series.