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A Veneer of Virtue
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 16 2026
Pages: 172
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.43 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
SHE ONLY KILLS THE ONES WHO DESERVE IT. SHE NEVER LEAVES A TRACE. UNTIL NOW.
Book One of the Drunken Pelican Mysteries.
Tess Waverly is a vegan PI, a devoted wife, and - very quietly - the most careful killer on the South Carolina coast.
For thirty years she's lived by a code: only the guilty, only the ones the law let walk, and never, ever a mistake. By day she runs surveillance from a folding chair in the Lowcountry heat. By night she balances the ledger the courts won't. And every evening she comes home to Beau - her husband, her sanctuary, and the lead homicide detective for the county.
When a grieving woman hires Tess to watch the man who got away with murdering her sister - a smiling developer with a perfect alibi and a beautiful, lying smile - Tess does what she does best. Quiet. Clean. Gone with the tide.
Except this time she leaves one small, ordinary thing behind. And the detective who pulls the thread is the man who's loved her for half her life.
Now the safest place Tess has ever known has become the front line of an investigation only one of them knows they're fighting. To keep Beau from the truth, she'll have to do the one thing her code was built to forbid... and become someone even she might not recognize.
Set among the marshes, gator holes, and vanishing live oaks of Pawleys Island, A Veneer of Virtue is a Southern gothic thriller with a heart as warm as it is wicked.
For readers who like their mysteries atmospheric, their heroines morally complicated, and their justice served stone-cold.
Welcome to the Drunken Pelican. Mind the still water.
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