Nora Blackwell · Cozy Mystery · Series Ongoing
Magnolia Bay
MysteriesA June Calloway Mystery. Gulf Coast Florida. Something is always wrong behind the garden gate.
"Atmospheric Southern mysteries where charming small towns hide old secrets and danger often lurks behind perfect garden gates."
The World
Magnolia Bay sits on the Gulf Coast of Florida — the kind of small town that looks effortless from the outside. Warm light, slow mornings, beautiful gardens, old families who have been here long enough to accumulate complicated history. June Calloway arrived looking for quiet. Magnolia Bay had other plans.
Each book is a standalone mystery with a complete case and resolution. June is the constant — sharp-eyed, stubborn, and quietly relentless, with a talent for noticing the things people most want overlooked. The town itself is a character: its community deepens across the series, its secrets compound, and its residents become familiar in the way of a place you've actually been.
Three books in, she's stopped being surprised when trouble finds her.
Reading Order
The Books
Death at the Garden Club
June Calloway moves to the sleepy Florida coast of Magnolia Bay expecting peace, dahlias, and quiet mornings. What she gets is a body at the garden club's spring showcase and a town full of people with very good reasons to keep secrets. June, it turns out, is not built for leaving things alone.
Read on Amazon ↗
A Killing at the Garden Tour
Magnolia Bay's annual garden tour is the social event of the season — until a prominent local turns up dead on the most beautiful property on the route. June finds herself tangled in old money, older grudges, and a truth someone in town would very much like to stay buried.
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The Auction House Affair
When the old Marsh estate goes up for auction, June expects estate sale curiosities — not a death connected to a 1954 land conspiracy that a prominent local family has spent decades burying. What started as a real estate transaction becomes the most personal case June has faced yet.
Read on Amazon ↗What the Ground Keeps
In February, the Gulf goes pewter and Magnolia Bay settles into a version of itself that has nothing to prove. June Calloway is putting her dahlia corms back in the ground. A neighbor named Tom has started bringing coffee without being asked. Things are, carefully, good.
Then Roy Thibodeaux calls from the east boundary of the Dames property, where he has been clearing forty years of scrub growth and has found something underneath it. A concrete slab. Stub walls. The clean lines of a building that was taken down rather than left to fall.
The same morning, a woman from Atlanta checks into the Route 9 Motel and asks how close she is to the historical society. Her name is Petra Gault. Her grandmother taught at a school that stood on this land from 1928 until October 1951, when it burned. The fire was ruled accidental. The school had no electrical wiring.
By Tuesday, the man who had been following Petra for four months is found drowned at the public boat launch. And someone has been inside June's house. Nothing was taken. Just moved.
Coming SoonWho This Is For
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