One-Star Stay

Book One

One-Star Stay

He wanted her cabins. He left one star.
Then he turned up dead in her hot tub.

Mack Dowell spent twenty-six years catching liars for an Atlanta insurance company. Now she’s home in Sugar Gap, Tennessee, running her late aunt’s eleven rental cabins, a three-legged basset hound named Biscuit, and a bank balance that’s one bad review away from disaster.

So when a family reunion from Buckhead books the Summit, her priciest cabin, for a matriarch’s eightieth birthday, Mack needs everything to go right. Instead, the man paying the bill is Grant Whitlock, the developer whose shortcuts she exposed fourteen years ago, and he never forgot her name. By Friday morning he’s posted a scathing one-star review. By ten, he’s floating in the hot tub.

The sheriff blames faulty equipment. The internet blames Hollow Pines. Half the town blames Mack. But Mack knows damage, and this damage doesn’t match the story.

With a crew of nosy pickleball-playing retirees, a banjo-picking handyman, and the deputy she never quite said goodbye to, Mack has to figure out which of Grant’s nearest and dearest wanted him gone before the killer checks out for good.

Includes Mack’s apple pie recipe, glitter and all.

Book Two · November 17, 2026

Last Seen at Earl’s

Thirty-three years ago, a girl vanished from Earl’s Putt-n-Shoot.
Mack was fifty feet away.

Mack Dowell survived her first murder. Now she has to survive Thanksgiving: two grown kids, one ex-husband who has booked the most notorious cabin in the Smokies, and a deputy who keeps showing up with firewood nobody ordered.

Then Cold Country, the number-one true-crime podcast in America, rolls into Hollow Pines to reopen the 1993 vanishing of seventeen-year-old Misty Cagle, last seen on Lights Night at Earl Pruitt’s Putt-n-Shoot. Mack was there. So was half the town. And nobody saw a thing.

When the podcast’s star is found at the bottom of the Drop, the same cliff where Misty’s boot turned up thirty-three years ago, the sheriff wants a cold-case killer, and he’s found one: cranky old Earl Pruitt, who still won’t say one word about that night.

Mack knows how stories get told, and when they don’t match the damage. With a three-legged basset hound, a pickleball team of retirees, and a deputy exiled to Christmas traffic at the outlet mall, she has until Christmas to find out who killed the storyteller, and finally see what she missed in 1993.

Book Three · December 15, 2026

Any Objections?

The wedding is in seven days. The officiant is dead.
And the groom can’t remember a thing.

Two murders in a month, and the Sugar Gap tourism board would like everybody to please stop saying “murder capital of the Smokies.”

Mack Dowell would like that too. She has a New Year’s Eve wedding to host, a cabin full of ex-husband, a son with a ring in his pocket, and, for the first time in thirty-three years, a real date with Deputy Cal Tolliver. Christmas Eve. Seven o’clock. His idea.

Then the wedding’s officiant, the bride’s charming, broke, online-ordained cousin, turns up dead on the county-line road. The groom is in the hospital with a concussion and no memory of the night before, and Sheriff Buck Haney is cutting his beach vacation short to arrest him on the six o’clock news.

The bride wants her wedding. The two families want each other gone. And somewhere in the snow there’s a missing white chair that somebody had to pay for.

Mack knows a damage claim when she sees one. She just has to file this one before the ball drops.

Includes Maddie’s Nana’s chocolate chip cookie recipe. Double the vanilla.