Welcome back to Pea Ridge, where the ground keeps every secret the living try to bury.

A year in, Maple Crowder has almost gotten the hang of it—the nursery, the green-witch gift she quit pretending she doesn't have, and a one-eyed tomcat who still outranks her. Then Heritage Days rolls into Pea Ridge, and so does Sterling Mabry, the smooth-talking host of a ghost-hunting TV show who wants to point his cameras at the one place he's been told he can't: the old battlefield ground above the Crowder line, where even Maple doesn't go. She warns him off. He goes anyway. And by the end of the festival weekend, Sterling Mabry is dead in a federal hollow—with one of Maple's own flower wreaths laid beside him and a sprig of deadly nightshade tucked into it that never came from her garden.

Somebody wanted him found that way. Somebody wanted her name in the same sentence as the body—the way this town once tried to pin a murder on Aunt Birdie and would happily do it again. This time the sheriff isn't the problem. This time it's federal ground, a federal agent, and a killer patient enough to hide in plain sight while the whole county films the parade.

Maple can account for every poison she owns. Proving it means trusting the wrong-footed detective who notices too much, an out-of-town agent who might just be smart enough to listen, and a cat who keeps pointing her toward the dark up the slope—toward the forbidden acres somebody has been quietly looting for years, and the older thing that's been waiting under them all along. The Crowder women keep this town stitched together. But some seams were never meant to be pulled.

Nothing taken. All given. Welcome back to Pea Ridge—where the ground keeps every secret the living buried.