DEAD IN THE DOG HOUSE

Nora Bledsoe traded a decade of logistics spreadsheets for a dog-friendly coffee shop in a sleepy Tennessee town. The Daily Bark wasn’t supposed to be complicated. Good coffee, a wraparound porch, and a greyhound who finally had somewhere quiet to be. She’d gotten very good, over the years, at building things that worked. She’d also gotten very good at leaving before anyone could ask why she left.

Then one Thursday morning before opening, her rescue greyhound Biscuit leads her to the body of Harlow Creek’s beloved dog trainer — right behind the dumpster enclosure, staged to look like a fall.

The sheriff calls it an accident. Nora notices three things that don’t fit. And Biscuit won’t stop circling the locked storage unit out back. When she forces the lock, she finds a registration certificate for a dog that doesn’t exist — and ten years tracking supply chain errors kicks in like a reflex she can’t turn off. What she follows backward through the Copper Ridge Kennel Club’s spotless records: six years of falsified pedigree papers, seven dogs with manufactured championship histories, nearly $400,000 in fraudulent sales, and a killer who knew Dale Whitfield was about to hand the whole thing to federal investigators. Now that killer knows Nora is asking questions. The Fall Classic dog show is four days away. And the evidence she spent three weeks building just vanished from her apartment while she was walking the dog.

Nora has spent two years in Harlow Creek performing a simpler version of herself — someone who makes coffee and minds her business and does not, under any circumstances, become the person who notices the thing no one else will look at. The investigation is going to make her that person again. The question is whether she’ll let Harlow Creek be the place she stops running from it.

Grounded small-town cozy mystery with a dry-witted sleuth, the best greyhound in fiction, and a paper trail worth dying for. The kind of book you read in one sitting and then immediately want the next one.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Mystery > Women Sleuths sits at 2.7 sales-to-comp (Beaten Track Mainstream) with 170 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the single highest-performing category in the cozy genre; this package is built for that list from the ground up

→ Dogs & Hounds leads the Animals sub-category with a competition index of 100 — the category’s top-performing trope, up +1 position, with $118K in monthly royalties; Biscuit is a market signal, not a mascot

→ Small Town & Rural is a new entrant at Hot Mainstream with only 6 competing titles — minimal competition against proven demand; rare gap at this stage of a genre’s maturity cycle

→ Fraud as crime type is trending up +2 positions (competition index 58) — differentiates from the saturated murder/poison cozy space while staying fully within the cozy register

→ “Person with Animal” cover feature up +10% in royalty share — the Nora-Biscuit composition is the highest-converting visual signal in the current Animals category

→ Greyhound rescue cross-promotion is an untapped launch channel — greyhound rescue communities are book-engaged, highly referred, and predisposed to champion a greyhound protagonist before the algorithm has any data

TROPES:

• Amateur sleuth — woman
• Retired racing greyhound companion
• Dog-friendly coffee shop anchor
• Small town Southern setting
• Fraud-based crime • Paper trail mystery
• Found family
• Fish out of water
• Reluctant investigator
• Community ensemble cast

HEAT LEVEL: no romance

Perfect for fans of: Deany Ray, T.A. Williams, Addison Moore, and Tonya Kappes