Murder at the Bungalow Court

Cozy Mystery · Clean / closed door · 26 chapters + epilogue · 85K novel · 1st person

Complete planning package, 113 pages: the premise, a full codex, every chapter outlined, an AI prompt for every chapter, and the whole launch kit — listing, blurb, keywords, posts, newsletter, reader magnet — already written. One buyer only. When it’s claimed, it’s gone.

Paloma Esquivel spent ten years on film sets making sure nothing moved between takes — the coffee cup in the same spot, the prop exactly where it was, the story consistent from one frame to the next. She was very good at it. Then her great-aunt died and left her eight cottages, seven tenants on rent-controlled leases nobody can touch, and a cat named Dolores who has already decided what she thinks of Paloma.

She comes to Port Solano to sell.

Then the annual Thanksgiving potluck happens — the one she agreed to host because she couldn't quite say no — and Stanley Wirth, the difficult man in Cottage 2 who has been quietly trying to buy the building for seven years, dies at the table before the pie is served. The police call it cardiac. Paloma's continuity eye logs six things that moved between his toast and the moment his chair scraped back.

Before she can call the realtor and go home, there's a lawyer next door who keeps being right about everything and won't stop helping her anyway, a casserole with a topping that tastes almost right, an epinephrine pen that ended up on the sideboard instead of in the jacket pocket where she'd seen it, an orange tree nobody has been picking that starts to feel like evidence of something, a cat who hates everyone except one specific tenant — and the slow, specific discovery that every person in this building has a secret they protected because Lucinda made it feel safe to have one here.

She's spent a decade keeping other people's stories consistent while having none of her own. Every tenant she interviews is starting to feel like a person instead of a suspect. And the six things on her continuity board won't arrange themselves into a picture she's willing to act on — until they do.

Cozy mystery with sun-drenched California warmth, a heroine whose professional eye is the best kind of unreliable narrator, and a found family she didn't mean to keep. The kind of book where you solve it at the same moment she does, and then you immediately go back to Chapter 4 to see what you missed.

WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ analysis with dual-category positioning (Amateur Sleuth + Cozy), competitive analysis against three proven top-100 comps, plus the Suspense Architecture additions: hidden timeline of what actually happened in order and a full fair-play audit of every planted clue, misdirection map, and reveal sequence

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Paloma's complete character arc and four voice example passages, supporting cast of seven tenants plus victim and love interest, Casa Marisol Court and Port Solano settings with full sensory profiles, 22-day chapter-by-chapter timeline, investigation development arc with the six-object continuity board tracked from plant to payoff, first-person voice guidelines, and series seeds for three future books

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 26 chapters + epilogue with scene breakdowns, emotional beats, key dialogue, chapter-specific sensory details, ending hooks, word count targets, and the six moved objects explicitly tracked across the full arc

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — one fully self-contained copy-paste prompt per chapter and epilogue, each with complete character context, voice guidance, scene specifics, investigation continuity, and the correct clue/red herring status for that point in the story

⭐️ Amazon Launch Kit — the listing, written: Amazon listing with dual-category placement and seven KDP keywords, back cover copy, 50-word short description, and two Ideogram cover prompts (1:1 story scene and 2:3 market cover) with settings

⭐️ Reader & Promo Kit — Instagram and Facebook posts, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, reader magnet concepts, reader targeting profile, and series marketing with tagline and read-through CTA

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table across three categories, five data-backed "why this will sell" points, competitive positioning with two comp titles, seven-keyword strategy table with per-keyword rationale, and launch positioning covering categories, pricing, cover direction, and series strategy

You write the book. The listing, the blurb, the keywords, the posts, the newsletter and the reader magnet are already written.

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Mystery › Amateur Sleuth sits at 3.1 sales-to-comp (Beaten Track Mainstream) with 81 daily sales per top 20 title — the category is in active rebound with the best rank performance in three years

→ The Landlord/Landlady hero trope carries a 94 Sales-to-Competition Index with only 0.4% market share — the highest-index character type with the most remaining room; no current cozy series owns this identity

→ Thanksgiving is the strongest unsaturated holiday in the cozy market — 78 Index, 1% book share vs. Christmas at 7%; this book is seasonally promotable in the market's peak retail window and readable year-round

→ California beach setting fills a genuine gap in the current top 100 — the category is dominated by British village and New England settings; Beach scores 64 on the location index and the West Coast is nearly absent from current bestsellers

→ Love as motive ($424K/month, #1 by royalty volume) delivered as a structural twist — the red herring points to developer greed; the real motive is a tragic protective love that reframes the whole book on the reveal

→ Cat trope (67 Index, $100K/month) plus found-family ensemble mirrors the comp structure of The Dog Ladies (#74 in October 2025 top 100), which validated this exact community-building cozy model at the top tier

TROPES: • Inherited property • Reluctant landlady as sleuth • Fish out of water (city professional in a small beach town) • Quirky tenants as found family • Surly cat who chooses one person (and that's a clue) • Closed-circle holiday death • Thanksgiving potluck gone wrong • Slow-burn romance with the lawyer next door • Protagonist who decides to stay • Professional skill as investigative engine • The obvious motive is the wrong one • Posthumous character revelation

HEAT LEVEL: Sweet / Closed Door — emotional warmth and a slow-burn romantic thread throughout; one kiss in the epilogue; the most intimate scenes are about noticing and being noticed

Perfect for fans of: Julie Titterington, Ellery Adams, Deany Ray, and Tonya Kappes

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