Dead to Rites (The Mel Hunter Mysteries)

The Killer was Precise to the Last Detail. So Was She.

In a town of two thousand, a food pantry director sees everything. She sees which families are having a hard autumn. She sees whose donation has gotten smaller and who has started coming back. She sees the man at the edge of the chess tournament crowd who isn't watching the games.

Mel Hunter has run The Giving Spoon for four years. She has learned to read a room, a register sheet, and a stranger's body language with equal precision. When Bernard Travers is killed by a bee swarm during the Possum Gap Chess Tournament, she sees what no one else is looking for: bees that don't behave properly, a panic that moves too fast for accident, a murder method hidden behind the most public possible death.

The investigation she runs from a food pantry supply closet, with a culinary chef student who loves chemistry, a Tennessee-born logistics wizard, and a beekeeper who is simultaneously her most important witness and her wrongfully arrested friend, is the kind of investigation nobody takes seriously until it's over. Mel doesn't need to be taken seriously. She needs to be right.

What she uncovers is a murder so carefully constructed it could only have been built by someone with patience, chemistry knowledge, and a twenty-four-year score to settle. The killer understood queen pheromone biology, the touch-move rule in competitive chess, and the behavioral patterns of the man he intended to kill. He was precise, methodical, and almost got away with it — because the one detail he couldn't anticipate was a woman who notices things.

Dead to Rites introduces a series set in the specific warmth of small-town Tennessee, anchored by a protagonist with rare moral clarity and a supporting cast of characters who are in the story for the right reasons: a team of people who care about the same things Mel cares about, and a community that is worth saving. The bees are innocent. The killer is brilliant. And Mel Hunter is exactly the right person to find him.