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Meetings & Motives: The Prequel Mystery: A Whispering Falls Cozy Magical Cat Mystery
Paperback
Series: Whispering Falls: Cozy Magical Cat Mysteries
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 19 2026
Pages: 246
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A surveyor who trusts maps.
A dying witch protecting a town.
Seven cats who have clearly been expecting him.
Gregory Barnes has spent thirty years reading land for a living. He knows what belongs on a map and what doesn't. He knows the difference between a boundary dispute and fraud. What he doesn't know, what no amount of experience prepared him for, is Whispering Falls.
He came on a routine commission. Verify the boundary lines of the south parcel, document the access points, and file the report. Straightforward work for a careful man.
Except the boundary lines haven't moved in two hundred years when they should have shifted a dozen times.
Someone pulled a critical survey document from the county archives six months ago and hasn't returned it. There's a tunnel beneath the property that doesn't appear on any map, built with precision that doesn't seem to have anything to do with drainage, leading to a chamber with a stone at its center that runs three degrees warmer than the air around it.... and then there's Evie Blackwood.
She's sixty-four, silver-haired, and completely living one day at a time despite a terminal diagnosis.
She makes tea exactly the way he likes it without asking. She has forty-three cats, give or take, because they don't hold still for a count. She has kept something ancient and important alive on this ridge for 60 years. He tells her what the documents say. She tells him what the land knows. Between them, they can see the whole shape of what someone is up to... and it's not good.The cats watch all of it. Bartles, the massive orange Maine Coon who runs the morning reports, filed a favorable assessment of Gregory in week one.
There's a warmth here that Gregory Barnes hasn't felt in twenty years. There's also a man in an expensive office who wonders if Gregory knows too much.
Meetings and Motives is the story of how Whispering Falls got its most recent guardian, and the man who loved it just long enough to make sure the right person inherited it.
Read it before Book One. Or after. Either way, you'll never look at the creek scene the same way again.
On the surface, everything looks peaceful in Whispering Falls. The falls know better.
Warning: This prequel includes terminal illness, grief, the death of a beloved character, and a restrained, non-graphic act of violence near the end. It is warm, magical, and cozy in tone, but it is also the story of what was lost before Book One begins. Yes, there's a cliffhanger, but you also get chapter one of book one, and Book one is right here at https: //www.amazon.com/dp/B0GT28LFVRAlso from
Whitmore, Hazel
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