Breathe deep in Crescent Lake — cedar, cold water, cinnamon from the bakery on Main. And one note underneath that doesn't belong.

Hazel Blackwood can smell what other people miss.

France trained her nose into an instrument. Then the company she worked for cut corners on one of her formulas, people got hurt, and her name was still on it. She came home to Crescent Lake to rebuild on her own terms. A shop on Main Street. A cat who judges the customers. Work she answers to nobody for.

Then Marnie Clearwater is found dead at the Cultural Center. Hazel's friend Marnie, who kept the Evergreen Society's books and sweetened everything from the same honey jar on her desk. It looks like her heart, the police say. The town stops there. They bow their heads for her at the next meeting. So does the person who killed her.

Hazel knows better. Under the chamomile and honey of Marnie's last cup is something that has no business being there. Dark. Bitter. Cold. Naming it costs her a night at the workbench, one bottle at a time, the way she'd build a blend.

Monkshood. It kills the way a bad heart does.

Proving it is another matter. Detective Reid Calloway deals in evidence, not in what a shopkeeper thinks she smelled, and Crescent Lake buried its questions a long time ago.

Not everyone thinks she's imagining it. There's the man behind the coffee counter, a geologist who reads the ground like a page, and a baker who hears everything.

Once, in a deposition, Hazel let the suits reduce her expertise to a woman who was probably mistaken. Not twice. Not over Marnie.

The scent leads down through forty-four years of small-town silence, toward a secret buried under the mountain. And toward someone she has known for years.

Can a woman nobody listens to make a whole town believe her? And can she do it before the one person who already knows she's right decides to stop her?

Buried Notes is the first Hazel Blackwood Perfumer Mystery: a Pacific Northwest small-town whodunit with quirky neighbors, a warm heart, a fair-play puzzle that keeps you guessing, and a slow-burn romance. No gore, nothing explicit on the page, and no cliffhanger.

A.C. Bell

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