Hex Signs and Homicide: A Festival Paranormal Cozy Mystery with a Witch Sleuth and Wolf-Dog Familiar

About Hex Signs and Homicide: A Festival Paranormal Cozy Mystery with a Witch Sleuth and Wolf-Dog Familiar

Summer turns Candlewick Creek into a stage. The town launches “Witch Trail Weekend,” a loud, glittery festival packed with staged rituals, costume parades, and sponsor banners on every surface. Tourists want spells and selfies.

The council wants donations and control. The wolf sanctuary is pressured to “participate for community spirit,” even as locals keep looking for reasons to blame wolves for everything that goes wrong. Opening night ends with a body.

The festival’s sponsor liaison is found dead in a closed historic garden beside the chapel, arranged like a ritual display: chalk marks, salt lines, a carefully placed charm. The crowd explodes into the exact argument the killer wants, screaming about witchcraft instead of asking what the victim was doing behind locked gates in the first place. Tamsin Hart sees the trick immediately.

Some of the scene is fake theatre. Some of it is not. As Deputy Rowan Pike tries to keep the investigation from being swallowed by festival politics, Tamsin follows vendor schedules, message timestamps, and the sponsor’s “community wellness” interviews that feel far too interested in private pain.

The victim was collecting leverage. The sponsor is pushing “partnership” language that reads like a contract with teeth. And someone is using staged hex signs to steer blame at the sanctuary, at Sable & Sage, and at Tamsin herself.

When her wolf-dog familiar, Moss, is injured by a hidden trap near the shop, the warning turns personal. Stop digging, or pay. Tamsin is forced to separate real magical residue from planted superstition, while the killer hides in plain sight behind festival smiles and “good cause” branding.

If she gets it wrong, Candlewick Creek will do what it always does when scared.