GROUNDS FOR GLORY - A Cozy Fantasy Mystery of Coffee, Secrets, and the Courage to Stay

She survived battlefields, siege engines, and twenty-two years of mercenary war. Nothing - nothing - prepared her for opening a coffee shop.

But when the first unsigned letter appears inside her locked door before dawn, Morra Ashbone realizes her quiet retirement has just become the most dangerous thing she has ever done.

Morra Ashbone is done. Done with swords, tents, and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being good at something that costs you everything. At forty-one — ancient in mercenary years — she buys a copper espresso machine, rents a narrow building on Caldwell Street in the city of Vel Serrat, and makes the most reckless decision of her career: she is going to open the first coffee shop in a city that has never heard of coffee.

What she gets instead of peace: a gnome barista with one and a half eyebrows and a gift for explosive chemistry experiments. A rival tavern owner who files a pre-emptive noise complaint before she opens her doors. A city herbalist who arrives on day one with a journal full of "professional questions" and keeps bringing plants she swears are for research. And slowly, unexpectedly, something that starts to look like the life she did not know she was building.

Then the letters start.

Unsigned. Slipped under a locked door before dawn. A single line pointing to a supply chain she thought she understood. A roasted coffee bean darker than anything she sells — processed twice, she suspects, to hide what it originally was. A shipping manifest number passed to her by a troll who speaks in single words and watches the canal from his window table every morning. Someone is feeding her information. Someone who knows who she used to be. Someone who has decided that Morra Ashbone, retired, is more useful than Morra Ashbone at war — and pointed her at a conspiracy that runs from the docks to the harbor authority to the very beans in her machine.

The consortium wants her street. They want her supply chain. They have already falsified estate records, pressured a merchant into silence, and filed a fraudulent inspection report against her building at six in the morning to watch how fast she breaks.

She doesn't break.

But as Morra follows each thread — through a solicitor who is afraid of complicated things and therefore excellent at them, through a herbalist who forgot to mention she's been running a parallel investigation for six weeks, through a canal-district troll holding a document that could unravel everything — she realizes the conspiracy is larger than one street, one estate, or one city block. And the anonymous letters haven't stopped. Whoever is sending them knows things they shouldn't. They knew about her past before she told anyone. They knew about the supply chain before Vera did. They knew about the consortium's next move before the consortium made it.

Which means they have been inside this story from the very beginning.

Someone has been watching Morra Ashbone since before she unlocked her door on opening day - and the only question that will keep you up at night is this:  Did they come to help her? Or did they come to make sure she never figures out the one secret that would put them all in danger?