The Kiln Creek Mysteries

Frankie Mercer didn't come back to Kiln Creek to solve a murder. She came back because her mother died, her father won't eat, and ten years of guilt finally caught up with her.

Opening a pottery studio in the small Kentucky town where she grew up is supposed to be a fresh start. The opinionated black cat who walks into the studio and refuses to leave is not part of the plan. Neither is the quiet baker down the street — the one with the guava pastries and the careful hands and the smile that makes Frankie forget what she was doing.

Then Hank Leland, a beloved local glass artist, drops dead the morning after the town's biggest event. Heart attack, they say. Case closed.

Frankie can't close it.

With her best friend Shanice — who texts in complete sentences and takes notes like she's building a prosecution — Frankie starts asking the questions nobody wants answered. What she uncovers is a web of predatory loans, stolen art, and a founding family that's been bleeding Kiln Creek's artists dry for years.

Someone killed Hank to keep him quiet. And now that Frankie's asking questions, they'd like her to stop too.

A Kiln to Die For is the first book in the Kiln Creek Mysteries — a queer cozy mystery series about a potter, her cat, and a small town where the clay is real and the secrets run deep.

Summer in Kiln Creek should be simple. Throw pots. Sell mugs. Survive the tourist invasion.

But when a freelance journalist shows up asking razor-sharp questions about the arts collective — production methods, pricing, provenance — Frankie notices. Rebecca Marsh isn't browsing galleries. She's investigating them.

Then Rebecca vanishes. Her car's still at the hotel. Her phone pings near the abandoned mill ruins, then goes dark. The county says she wandered off. Frankie knows better.

What Frankie and her crew find is worse than a missing person: a fraud ring selling factory-made art as handmade originals, a roster of fictional artists who don't exist outside a gallery website, and a paper trail leading back to the same family name that owns half of Main Street.

Meanwhile, there's the baker. The one with the sourdough starter named Abuela and the Thursday texts that have become as necessary as breathing. The one Frankie almost kissed before everything went sideways.

Glazed and Confused is the second book in the Kiln Creek Mysteries — a queer cozy mystery series set in small-town Kentucky where the cat is judgmental, the coffee is strong, and the truth is always harder to shape than you'd expect.

Tommy Mercer's construction crew finds bones in a foundation wall. His first call isn't to the police. It's to his sister.

The remains belong to Earl Sutter — a mill worker who disappeared in 1997 after pushing for an investigation into chemical dumping along Kiln Creek. Everyone assumed he left town. Everyone was wrong.

Now Frankie and her crew are pulling at threads the founding families spent twenty-seven years burying. Stolen archives. Smashed windows. A note left inside Frankie's locked studio: LEAVE IT ALONE.

She's not leaving it alone.

The connection she's been building with Adriana — the precise, warm, cardamom-scented baker who's been closing the distance between them for months — finally becomes something she can't pretend is just friendship.

Fired Up is the third book in the Kiln Creek Mysteries — where the cold cases are heating up, the romance is finally here, and Monty remains unimpressed by all of it.

January buries Kiln Creek under two feet of snow. Frankie's living at Adriana's apartment now — bread smell every morning, Monty dividing his time between addresses like a custody arrangement nobody agreed to.

The winter artist residency brings six ceramicists into the Collective. Close quarters. Big egos. Good work. Then Pia Okafor, a visiting artist with a glaze formula worth serious money, finds her studio destroyed. Every finished piece smashed. Not rage. Calculation.

The trail leads to someone Frankie trusts. Someone who knew and said nothing. Five words that cost Frankie a friendship and force a question she's been avoiding: what does loyalty mean when the people you love are complicit in the thing you're fighting?

Slip Casting is the fourth book in the Kiln Creek Mysteries — where the snow is deep, the betrayals are quiet, and the founding families' grip on this town is starting to crack.

Claude Whitmore's podcast drops a bombshell.

One episode connects everything: the mill closure, Earl Sutter's murder, the Heritage Foundation, and a new allegation that changes the stakes entirely — Kiln Creek's water has been contaminated with heavy metals for decades. Families have been drinking it. Kids have been swimming in it. And someone suppressed the original report in 1997.

In a hospital room stripped of his charm, Claude finally tells Frankie the truth. He didn't come to Kiln Creek for a podcast. A family member was involved in the original cover-up. He came for answers about his own blood.

Grace Chen, who has kept a secret for twenty-seven years — what she witnessed through the library basement window the night the mill closed — finally speaks.

Bisque Ware is the fifth book in the Kiln Creek Mysteries — where the truth is finally surfacing, the cost of silence is measured in poisoned water, and Monty would like everyone to keep it down.

The town hall meeting is standing room only. Families with lawyers on one side. Everyone else on the other. Lester Caldwell, the 82-year-old patriarch who's pulled strings in Kiln Creek for half a century, sits in the front row and says nothing.

The next morning, he's found dead in the Old Mill ruins — the same spot where Earl Sutter's bones were sealed into a wall twenty-seven years ago.

Vera takes the case. The suspect list is essentially a phone book.

Grace testifies publicly for the first time — forty-five minutes, no notes, coffee in hand, hands steady. The Land Trust dissolves. Cleanup begins. Some artists leave. The future is uncertain and honest.

Frankie could go. Her reputation would carry anywhere. She stays.

Kiln Fired is the final book in the Kiln Creek Mysteries — where every secret surfaces, every thread resolves, and Colonel Montgomery Blacke judges from the kiln shelf one last time.