The Espresso Hex

She inherited a haunted café. Nobody mentioned the cat would have opinions. When Sage's great-aunt Zinnia passes, she leaves behind more than a crumbling Victorian coffee shop in Wickbrook Falls — she leaves a black cat named Biscuit who talks, judges, and expects to be obeyed; a menu full of little magics; and one drink recipe scrawled in the margins with a warning underlined twice: the Espresso Hex. With her oldest friend Priya bullying furniture into place and refusing to let her fall apart quietly, Sage reopens The Brew & Broomstick to a packed house — and, egged on by Priya, serves the Espresso Hex for the first time. One sip and the truth just… comes out. Funny truths. Harmless truths. Right up until Wickbrook Falls' least-liked developer, Harlan Voss, drinks his in one go, smiles like he's won something, and turns up dead in an alley the next morning. Now Sage is the café owner who served the town's newest murder victim his last cup of coffee, and Detective Cal Ashgrove — the infuriatingly observant cop who wrote her up for a noise complaint her first week in town — is the one investigating her. Between grinding beans, dodging suspicion, and doing her best not to notice how good Cal looks holding a mug, Sage has to find out who really wanted Voss dead before the Espresso Hex decides everyone's secrets are due. Perfect for readers who love: witchy small-town charm · talking cat familiars · slow-burn romance · found family · zero gore, all cozy. Every Brew & Broomstick mystery wraps up with a satisfying ending — and a guaranteed cozy landing. Grab your latte and join Sage and Biscuit today. The Espresso Hex is Book 1 in the Brew & Broomstick Mystery series: a cozy, low-heat mystery with a magical menu, a slow-burn romance, and a cat who already knows whodunit. TROPES: Cozy Witch Mystery, Grumpy Detective x Quirky Café Owner, Small Town Secrets, Talking Cat Sidekick, Slow Burn Romance

The thing nobody tells you about inheriting a haunted coffee shop is that the will reads exactly like every other will. No fine print about ghosts. No footnote about the cat. I found that out standing on the sidewalk outside The Brew & Broomstick with a cardboard box of my life balanced on one hip and a set of brass keys warm from my own nervous grip, staring up at a building that looked like it had been carved out of gingerbread and stubbornness. Two stories of dark timber and leaded glass, a slate roof gone soft green with moss, a hand-painted sign swinging on wrought iron hooks that read THE BREW & BROOMSTICK in letters so faded they'd gone the color of weak tea. Below that, in smaller script: est. by Z. Hawthorne, and nobody's business how long ago. You're smaller than I remembered, said a voice. I looked around. Wickbrook Falls' town square was doing its late-September best — striped awnings, a fountain nobody had turned off in what looked like a decade, a man on a bench feeding pigeons that were extremely uninterested in him. Nobody near me. Nobody who looked like they'd just spoken, anyway. Down here, the voice said, with the particular patience of someone repeating themselves for the very last time. A cat sat in the café's front window, tail wrapped around her paws, watching me through the glass like I was a specimen that had wandered in a full ten minutes late for its own dissection. Sleek black, greenish eyes, an expression of profound unimpressed-ness that I would come to learn was more or less her resting state. "Cats don't talk," I said, out loud, to a cat, on a public street, which was already not my finest moment. And yet. I did not scream. I want that on the record. I made a small, undignified noise that startled the pigeon man, and I did not scream. "Great-Aunt Zinnia's lawyer mentioned a cat," I said, mostly to give my brain somewhere to put itself. "He did not mention that the cat was going to critique my personality before I'd even gotten the door open." Biscuit, the cat said, like that settled things, and hopped down out of the window, presumably to go let me in, since apparently that was also a skill on her resume. The bell over the door gave a cheerful little jingle when I finally got the key to cooperate, and the smell hit me before anything else did — coffee, yes, dark and rich and a little smoky, but under it, cardamom and orange peel and something green and growing that I couldn't name. My throat did something complicated. I hadn't been back to Wickbrook Falls in eleven years, not since the disorganized, glorious teenage summers I'd spent underfoot in this exact kitchen while Aunt Zinnia let me "help," which had mostly meant eating more scones than any growing kid should reasonably survive. The café itself was frozen mid-breath, like she'd stepped out for one afternoon and simply never come back. Mismatched armchairs in jewel-toned velvet. Shelves of chipped mugs that didn't match each other on purpose. A chalkboard menu with half the specials still listed, the chalk smudged at the edges like someone had erased something in a hurry. Copper pots hanging from a rack over the espresso bar, catching the late light and throwing it around the room in little gold coins. And behind the counter, propped open on a stand like a hymnal, an enormous leather recipe book with HAWTHORNE embossed on the spine in letters gone dark with handling. She left that open on purpose, Biscuit informed me, winding around my ankles with the air of a tour guide who'd done this walk-through a hundred times and was already bored of it. She said you'd need it faster than you'd believe. "Need it for what? Baking?" Biscuit gave me a look I can only describe as generous, the way you're generous with someone who's about to learn something the hard way and there's no point rushing it. I set my box down on the nearest table and went to the book instead of interrogating a cat further, which felt, in the moment, like the more sane use of my energy. The page it was open to had a recipe in handwriting so familiar it made my chest ache — Zinnia's looping, impatient scrawl, the kind that got faster and messier the more excited she was about something. Espresso Hex, the header read, underlined twice. Below the ingredient list, in the margin, in a different pen, like she'd added it later as an afterthought that was actually the opposite of an afterthought: NEVER brew angry. Ask me how I know. "Cute," I said. "Very whimsical. Great-Aunt Zinnia, ladies and gentlemen, folk artist and menu poet." She really didn't tell you anything, Biscuit said, and for a cat, managed to sound remarkably like my mother did whenever the subject of Zinnia came up at Thanksgiving — fondness wrapped so tightly around worry you could barely tell them apart. "She told me I was inheriting a café," I said. "She told me the town was charming and the rent was paid up and I should absolutely, positively come see the place before I decided what to do with it, and if I sold it she would haunt me, and I said, ha ha, very funny, Aunt Zinnia, and now I'm standing in her kitchen having an argument with her cat, so please, enlighten me. What am I missing?" Biscuit considered this for a long moment, tail flicking once, twice, and then said, with the air of someone deciding the easy way clearly wasn't going to work, You're a Hawthorne. This building sits on land that's been ours for three hundred years. And that book isn't full of recipes, sweetheart. It's full of spells that happen to taste very good with oat milk. I laughed. I actually laughed, a short disbelieving bark of it, because the alternative was standing very still and letting that sentence mean something, and I was not prepared to do that on my first evening in a town I'd left over a decade ago, holding a box that still had a Sharpie label on the side reading SAGE — KITCHEN in my own handwriting from two states and one entire life ago. Biscuit did not laugh. Cats, I would learn, rarely do. I spent that first night the way you'd expect anyone to spend it — unpacking exactly nothing, drinking tea I found in a tin marked simply CALM (which, fine, did in fact make me feel unusually calm, but I chalked that up to chamomile and jet lag and the particular exhaustion of four hundred miles alone behind the wheel, three questionable playlists, and one entire life folded into a single cardboard box) — and reading. The recipe book, cover to cover, or as close to it as I could get before my eyes gave out around midnight. It was full of drinks. Ordinary-sounding ones, mostly — a lavender latte, a spiced chai, a plain drip coffee annotated only with the word patience, doubled underlined. But scattered through them, in Zinnia's restless handwriting, were notes that read less like a chef's and more like a — I didn't have a better word for it yet — a witch's. Effects. Warnings. One entry for a "Courage Cortado" had a small drawing of a stick figure visibly trembling next to the words works fastest on people who already know the truth and are just scared to say it. I told myself, lying in the narrow bed in the apartment above the shop, staring at water stains on the ceiling that had probably been there since before I was born, that I would deal with all of this — the talking cat, the loaded recipe book, the town, the grief I hadn't let myself feel yet for a woman who'd been more like a mother to me some summers than my actual mother had time to be — in the morning. Biscuit curled up at the foot of the bed without being invited, which I understood, even then, to be less an accident and more a decision. For the record, she said, right as I was drifting off, the grand reopening is in five days. The whole town's expecting it. Zinnia already told half of Wickbrook Falls you were coming to save the place. "She what," I said, to the ceiling, to the dark, to absolutely no one who was going to give me a satisfying answer tonight. Biscuit, already asleep or doing an extremely convincing impression of it, did not respond. I lay there a long time after that, listening to a building that creaked like it was settling in around me, like it recognized me, like it had been waiting. Whatever else was true — talking cats, cryptic recipe books, a dead woman's handwriting promising me things I wasn't ready to believe — one thing was undeniable by the time I finally fell asleep. I was already, hopelessly, home.