Original AI-generated book

The Cardamom Ward on Cascade Street

About this book

Twenty-three-year-old Mira Solis has a plan: finish her coding bootcamp, unload the bakery she never asked for, and leave Seattle's rain behind. The plan lasts exactly until she finds old Mr. Brann—brownie landlord, beloved mediator, and the closest thing the hidden Cascade Quarter has to a conscience—dead behind her proofing racks, a half-eaten honey-cardamom twist still in his hand and a rare binding curse worked into the crumb. The Quarter is a pocket of glamoured fae, culverted river spirits, and hedge-witches running corner shops under human noses, and it has nine days of grace before an outside shadow court can claim jurisdiction over Brann's death. If that happens, the glamours thin, the corner shops go, and the Quarter's peculiar homemade justice—settled over scones and steamed milk—collapses into something colder. Nobody wants Mira to investigate. Mira least of all. But the icing on that twist was piped in runes, the bakery's flour sacks are hiding a ledger of unpaid favors, and Mira's late aunt left behind a walk-in oven with a door that shouldn't be there. Told in Mira's wry first person and braided out of order—the morning she found the body, the three chaotic months that led to it, and the tense rain-soaked neighborhood watches still to come—this is a cozy urban fantasy mystery about locked-room pastry puzzles, recipe books that eat memories, a sharp-tongued fox-spirit barista who lies for a living, a vampire pâtissier with a hole where his apprenticeship used to be, and a potluck where the jam tells the truth whether you're ready or not. No gore, plenty of butter, and a reluctant hero learning that comfort is not the opposite of courage.