The Moonroot
Apothecary Mysteries

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book One

Murder Among the Moonroot

Some things the mountain keeps. Rowan Ashcroft was never any good at leaving them buried.

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Twelve years ago, Rowan left Moonroot Hollow for the wide world and a life among strangers. Now her great-aunt Evelyn is dead, the old apothecary on the hill is hers, and she means to settle the estate and be gone before the first snow. Then she smells it — foxglove, where no foxglove should be — as Harlan Whitmore drops dead at the Harvest Festival with his tonic cup still warm in his hand.

The town is content to call it a bad heart. Rowan knows it's murder. She also knows the poison was brewed the Ashcroft way, from a recipe out of her own family's stolen books — and that someone has arranged for the new girl at the apothecary to take the fall.

With a skeptical sheriff, a whole valley turning against her, and a killer who has been patient for twenty years, Rowan has only her wits, her plants, and the people everyone else crosses the street to avoid. To clear her aunt's name and her own, she'll follow the clue no one else can read — one leaf, one recipe, one small careless lie — straight to a truth that's kinder and crueler than anyone in Moonroot Hollow is ready to hear.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Two

Murder by Mugwort

In Moonroot Hollow, the deadliest things are the ones made with love.

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Winter settles over the Blue Ridge, the Christmas Market glows on Main Street, and the town has finally begun to treat the returned herbalist as one of its own. Then Preston Ames sweeps in — all silver hair and gold cards — offering to make the Ashcroft name famous by turning five generations of mountain healing into a wellness brand. He cheats the families who trust him. He hunts, a little too pointedly, for Rowan's stolen family herbal. And after the Winter Lantern Walk, he is found frozen at the old quarry, a tragic accident the whole valley is quietly glad to accept.

Rowan can't. Tucked in the dead man's coat and steeped in the thermos beside him is mugwort — the harmless dream-herb sold at every stall in the square, prepared the old careful way into something that puts a man down past waking. Someone with the granny-women's knowledge did this. Someone gentle. Someone patient. To catch a killer no one wants caught — and to keep the town from blaming the one family everyone already fears — Rowan must follow one sprig of a common plant to a thirty-year-old wound.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, winter · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Three

Murder Under the Hemlock

Some greens feed you. One will stop your heart. Dell Ledford never once got them wrong.

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Spring has come to Moonroot Hollow, the woods are greening, and Rowan Ashcroft is finding her feet at last — a full turn of the seasons home now, the town hers, a good man at her side. Then the county's most beloved forager, the man who knew every green on the mountain, is found dead of water hemlock at the edge of the dying groves, and the whole valley grieves the one thing no one thought possible: that even the best of them could slip.

Rowan can't. Dell Ledford would no more have eaten hemlock than flown, and the poison that killed him wasn't a forager's mistake — it was cut and cooked the old careful way, by a hand with forty years of granny-craft in it. But when the sheriff arrests Dell's nineteen-year-old daughter, Rowan is the only soul who can see that the very skill of the poisoning is the thing that clears the girl — and points, down a short and terrible trail, at someone gentle, someone patient, someone who loved the old knowing too much to watch it sold.

And behind it all, a shadow that has hunted the Ashcroft line for a generation is about to step, at last, into the light.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, spring · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Four

Murder Among the Foxglove

Foxglove heals a failing heart. In the right hands, the same bloom stops a sound one — and leaves no mark at all.

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Late spring brings Decoration Day to Moonroot Hollow, when the whole county climbs to the old churchyard to clean the graves and deck them with flowers. Verlie Sizemore, the beloved keeper of the cemetery's records, has spent five years giving the poor graves back their names — and has just found one stone that's been telling a lie for forty years. She means to set it right at the centennial. She dies the evening before, of a "bad heart," among the very flowers she was laying on the graves.

Rowan Ashcroft knows a stopped heart from a failing one, and this one was stopped — with a rare, near-lost preparation of the dead man's bells. But nobody hated Verlie; the motive is buried in the grave she'd just proven was false. To find who silenced a good woman, Rowan must unbury a forty-year-old death the whole valley agreed to forget — and follow it to the gentlest hand in the Hollow.

And behind it all, the collector who has hunted the Ashcroft line for a generation steps, at last, out of the shadows and up her own walk.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, late spring · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Five

Murder in the Lavender

Lavender for a bride, lavender for the dead. This summer, the gentlest herb in the mountains hides a killing — and the poison points straight at Rowan.

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High summer brings the Midsummer Herb Fair to Moonroot Hollow — the apothecary's own showcase, the whole county's growers gathered under long gold evenings — and Rowan is finally planning an October wedding. Then a smooth out-of-town broker, buying mountain herbs with contracts that ruin the families who sign them, drops dead among the stalls, minutes after mocking his way through a tasting at Rowan's own booth.

The town is content to call it his heart. Only Rowan's trained nose finds the truth: a bitter poison drowned under a tea perfumed far too heavily with lavender — a mask, and therefore murder. But the quarrel was public, the craft is hers, and the last cup the dead man drank came from her own hand. A state investigator moves to charge Rowan Ashcroft with murder, weeks before her wedding.

Penned and watched, Rowan must solve the killing from the wrong side of the counter — proving the masking lavender belonged not to her stock but to one grieving grower's fields — while the patient collector who has hunted her family for a generation offers, so gently, to make it all go away.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, high summer · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Six

Murder by Belladonna

No one on earth wanted Burl Salyer dead. That was the whole trouble: the poison was never meant for him.

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Deep autumn brings the Harvest Festival home to Moonroot Hollow — a full round of the year since Rowan Ashcroft came back a stranger, and three weeks since she married the deputy who waited for her. Then gentle, universally-beloved Burl Salyer drops dead among the cider and the apples with a bottle of harvest cordial in his hand, poisoned with belladonna — the beautiful, deadly nightshade that grows in only one walled garden in the whole county.

There is not a soul in these mountains who would have hurt Burl. Which means, as only Rowan can see, that the cup was never his. It was meant for the cold out-of-town heir come to sell that garden out from under the woman who has tended it, alone, for thirty years. The killer failed. The real target is still alive. And to find the hand that poured it, Rowan must lift the one mask no one ever thinks to touch: the grief of the bereaved.

All the while, a hidden fraternity of collectors reaches for the poison garden's rare and dangerous library — and the patient shadow that has hunted the Ashcroft line for a generation, out of time at last, plays its coldest card.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, autumn · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Seven

Murder in the Nightshade

A traveling fair came up the frozen hollow in the dead of winter, when no fair ever should. By the fifth morning, its fortune-teller was dead — and the whole town knew exactly who to blame.

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Deep January locks Moonroot Hollow in snow, and into that white silence rolls the Corliss Travelling Fair — lantern-lit, striped, and wrong, a lit thing come up the frozen roads when nothing travels but trouble. Rowan Ashcroft, one winter married and a full year home, finds a kindred spirit in the fair's old fortune-teller, Sadie Corliss — the only other true reader she has ever met. Then Sadie is found poisoned at her own table, nightshade in the cup, the scene dressed to look like her own dark trade turned on her.

The town wants it simple: the strangers brought death, so run them out and let the snow bury it. They fix on Eli, the fair's silent orphaned boy, because he is the easiest soul to blame. But the poison being the fair's own points away from the fair — and Rowan, who remembers being the stranger a town feared, is the only person willing to hunt the trusted, unthinkable local hand behind it. What she uncovers is a twenty-five-year-old desertion, a borrowed dead man's name, and a boy owed the truth of who his father is.

All the while the old collector-shadow that has hunted her family for a generation is changing shape — the patient devil dying at last, a colder one rising to take what patience never could.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, deep winter · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Eight

Murder in the Bloodroot

A man dead of poison in a room barred from the inside. One set of tracks in the snow — his own. A murder that could not have been done.

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First thaw brings the whole county up to the Cauldwell sugarbush for the maple boil, and hard old Alton Cauldwell keeps his famous solo watch alone in the steam. By dawn he is dead at his cold arch — the drop-bar down on the inside, the shutter pegged, his the only footprints in the night's frozen crust, and every other soul asleep and vouched-for in the cabin. The county is glad to call it his heart, or the fire, or an old man's carelessness with his own dark remedies.

But herbalist Rowan Ashcroft can smell the bloodroot under the maple, and she knows the sealed room everyone calls impossible is not the obstacle but the answer. To crack it she must stop asking who got in — and start asking what in that room was set to be used by one man alone, at the end of his watch, by a hand long since asleep across the clearing. The trail runs twenty-two years back, to another death at that same camp, and a wrong the whole county helped to bury.

All the while, the shadow that has hunted her family for a generation has stopped raiding and started, quietly and lawfully, to buy up her mountain.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Locked-Room · Setting: Southwest Virginia, first thaw · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Nine

Murder in the Pennyroyal

The postmistress knew everyone's secrets. One of them killed her. And the wrong woman is confessing.

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The second spring comes to Moonroot Hollow with ramps and old ballads and the whole county gathered under the new leaves — until Orpha Slocomb, the postmistress who spent thirty years reading her neighbors' mail and hoarding what she found, is discovered dead of pennyroyal. The town knows at once whom to blame: the women's herb, the granny-women, and the young mother whose oldest secret Orpha had been holding over her. And before Rowan Ashcroft can say a word, the old granny-midwife who once helped that young woman walks in and confesses.

But Rowan can tell folk herb from bought oil, and a killing from a kindness — and she knows the confession is a lie told out of love. To break it she must prove a beloved innocent a liar against her own word, sort a murdered blackmailer's hoard of the whole county's secrets, and find the one hand with real ruin to hide — all while the shadow at her family's borders stops knocking and starts, quietly and lawfully, buying up the mountain she calls home.

A fair-play mystery of secrets and their keeping, and of the difference between holding a confidence safe and holding it as a weapon.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, full spring · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Ten

Murder Among the Ramps

Ramps and Ruin

The best ramp-digger in the county doesn't die eating false hellebore by mistake. Somebody fed it to him.

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Late spring brings a fever of easy money to Moonroot Hollow: an out-of-county operation is paying cash to strip the mountain's hundred-year wild ramp patches bare, and its charming local face is Rance Holloway, the best ramp-digger the county ever raised. Then Rance is found dead in a ravaged patch of what everyone calls a forager's tragic mistake — a mess of ramps that were really the deadly look-alike, false hellebore. The county mourns him with a bitter nod at the fitness of it, the woods taking their own revenge.

But herbalist Rowan Ashcroft knows a man who dug ramps for forty years could no more make that mistake than she could mistake foxglove for mint. It was murder — dressed in the beloved spring green so the whole county would bury it with a sigh. And as she works the long field of families his greed had ruined, hunting the hand among the wronged, Rowan trips over the thing she has spent nine years and nine killings never letting herself find: that the outside money stripping the ramps is the same cold hand buying her mountain — that the murder she is solving and the war she is losing are, this once, the very same case.

The tenth Moonroot mystery — the midpoint turn, where the series' two long threads braid at last.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, late spring · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Eleven

Murder Under the Angelica

The Angelica Grave

The stone says she died of fever. The angelica planted over her grave has said otherwise for forty years.

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High summer, and the county climbs to the old Ember Hill burying-ground for the yearly Decoration — to clean the graves, set the fallen stones, and lay down flowers for the dead. But a landslip has cracked open a grave forty years shut, and it gives up two things at once: the quiet proof that Docia Cutshaw, a young granny-midwife laid to rest under a stone that reads fever, was in truth poisoned — and, folded in oilcloth beneath her footstone, a marker left by herbalist Rowan Ashcroft's own vanished mother.

Then old Verna Sisk, who planted the angelica over that grave and has carried its secret in fear for forty years, is found dead over a cup of her own bitter tonic — the very morning she means at last to speak. Rowan can taste the wrongness under the angelica, and she knows the past has reached forward to close a mouth. To name the hand that killed to keep a forty-year lie buried, she must read the burying-ground itself — while the marker her mother left her draws the long war one grave nearer its center, and a courteous stranger who calls himself a friend of old cemeteries comes up the hollow, at last, to look her in the face.

The eleventh Moonroot mystery — a fair-play cozy of graves and their keeping, and the difference between honoring the dead and using them.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, high summer · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Twelve

Murder in the Pokeweed

Pokeweed Hollow

A dying man's last word names his killer. He wrote it in poke-berry ink — and somebody finished it after he was dead.

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Late summer, and the dying back-hollow of Pokeweed Hollow gathers one last time before it is sold off to the smiling stranger who has come to save it. Then Odell Cutbirth — the hollow's lifelong scribe and its last holdout against the sale — is found poisoned, with a dying word scrawled beside his hand in the poke-berry ink he has used all his life. The county reads the dead man's accusation and moves at once against the name it seems to give: his estranged, half-wild son.

But herbalist Rowan Ashcroft knows poke ink the way she knows every green thing, and she sees what no one else can — that the message was written in two inks of two ages, the true dying word finished, after death, by a second hand. To read what Odell truly died saying, Rowan must go up into Pokeweed Hollow and learn its secrets. And there she finds the thing she did not come for: that her own vanished mother's trail runs straight into this doomed ground — and that the cold hand which has hunted her family for a hundred years means, at last, to let her lead it home.

The twelfth Moonroot mystery — a fair-play cozy of a two-faced plant, and the difference between the hand that keeps and the hand that only takes.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, late summer · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Thirteen

Murder in the Snakeroot

Snakeroot Season

The milk-sickness always took the whole family. This time it took just one. That's how she knew it was murder.

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In the driest autumn in memory, hard old Loma Sutphin — the iron matriarch of the farm on Trembling Creek — dies of a thing the county believed long gone: milk sickness, the near-forgotten scourge that once killed whole settlements through their own cows' milk, the poison of the white snakeroot passed from a grazing cow into her butter. The county grieves it as a freak act of a dry, dreadful fall, and is glad to — a natural death asks nothing of anyone.

But herbalist Rowan Ashcroft knows the milk-sick was always a cluster: it took the whole household, and showed first in the cattle. And Loma died alone of it — her family well, her cows untroubled — a scourge of nature that fell, impossibly, on one hard old woman and spared everyone around her. A milk-sick that kills one and spares the rest is not nature's hand. It is a poison concentrated and aimed, carried to one private cup through wholly innocent hands, by a killer who was never in the room — who was demonstrably forty miles away the whole day she died. To name that killer, Rowan must stop asking who was with Loma when she died, and start asking who fed the poison into the chain, days and miles before the dying ever began.

The thirteenth Moonroot mystery — a fair-play cozy of a killing with no killer in it, and the terrible truth that the worst harms ride the gentlest hands.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, dry autumn · Content: Clean & cozy

The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Book Fourteen

Murder Under the Elder

The Elderberry Vow

A murder that comes with its own answer, gift-wrapped — and one herb-woman who will not swallow the sweet thing without tasting it.

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Deep winter, and a killing storm shuts remote Sabbath Cove off from the world just as its long-delayed wedding is sealed, by the oldest custom of the coves, with a cup of ceremonial elder wine. Then the elder-wife herself — old Aldie Kell, who has brewed the blessing and spoken the vows up that cove for forty years — falls dead at the threshold, and the snowbound county, cut off from all law and help, is handed its answer almost before the body is cold: the poison was in the wine, and the wine was last in the hands of Aldie's bitter, disinherited niece. Red-handed. Case closed. Everyone grateful.

But herbalist Rowan Ashcroft knows the elder's two natures — that a wine of ripe cooked berries is a blessing, not a poison, and that Aldie died of raw green elder, a thing that does not grow in the dead of a Blue Ridge winter and had to be cut green and hoarded months before. The killing was planned across a season, long before the quarrel the whole case rests on; and a murder that solves itself did not solve itself. Someone solved it. To find the hand that tied so neat a bow, Rowan must stop asking who the answer is and start asking who gave the cove its answer — and what is so terrible that a man would kill, and then labor to close his own killing.

The fourteenth Moonroot mystery — a fair-play cozy of the case that solves itself, and the hard truth that the deadliest thing in the world is the answer you are handed.

Series: The Moonroot Apothecary Mysteries · Genre: Cozy Mystery / Amateur Sleuth · Setting: Southwest Virginia, deep winter · Content: Clean & cozy