Two months ago, Amber Blackwood’s best friend, Melanie Cole, was fatally poisoned. Their small cat-loving town of Edgehill, Oregon, was thrown into upheaval amidst the first homicide in decades. Edgehill lost not only a beloved resident, but the director of the town’s annual Here and Meow Festival. After Melanie’s death, Kimberly Jones, an acquaintance of Amber’s from high school, assumed the role. The scandal also left two other committee seats open: finance chair and volunteer coordinator. Ann Marie became the head of the volunteer department, and Mayor Deidrick’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Chloe, became her assistant. The finance chair remained open.
While trying to solve Melanie’s murder, the chief of police, Owen Brown, learned Amber’s biggest secret: she’s a witch. No one else aside from Edgar—Amber’s cousin and fellow witch—knows. Though nervous about Amber’s abilities, the chief has seen how her spells can get him answers that normal police work can’t always provide. The sudden thaw in their interactions, however, has sent the small-town rumor mill into overdrive. The chief is married, his wife pregnant with their second child, yet people whisper more may be going on between Amber and the chief than meets the eye.
Last month, a member of the cursed Penhallow clan, Kieran Penhallow, traveled to Edgehill to find and steal the grimoire of Amber’s late mother, Annabelle, a prodigy of time and memory spells. She had created a spell that allowed a witch to go back in time. Ever since, Penhallows have been searching for the grimoire, determined to use its hidden secrets to prevent their clan from having ever been cursed in the first place. Annabelle knew that the rewriting of history could cause irrevocable harm, and she worked the rest of her life to keep the book hidden via elaborate cloaking spells. She and Amber’s father died at the hands of a Penhallow who had been after the grimoire.
Edgar had been tasked with keeping the book hidden until Amber turned eighteen. Due to a series of spells and attacks from the Penhallows, his consciousness was melded with that of a Penhallow, slowly driving him into madness. The location of the grimoire, up until last month, had been locked away so deep in Edgar’s mind that even he hadn’t known where to find it. When Amber found the book hidden on Edgar’s property, the decades-old cloaking spells on the coveted grimoire dropped, and the cursed Penhallow had come after it, with Amber in his sights.
Amber, her younger sister Willow, their paternal Aunt Gretchen, and Edgar managed to stop Kieran from stealing the book, but it came at a price. The magical attack on Edgar’s property nearly cost Amber her life when Kieran used his magic to choke her, and both Amber and Edgar’s cars had been torched. Worst of all, Jack Terrence—owner of Purrcolate, and Amber’s recent love interest—had witnessed everything. After the dust settled, and Kieran had been cured of his curse, Jack decided he found this witchy world of Amber’s too difficult to handle. He asked Aunt Gretchen to remove all memory of that night’s magic, and Amber’s connection to it, from his mind.
With her complicated and often dangerous past, Amber fears that guarding her secrets—and those of her parents—will keep her forever isolated.