Baby Queen: A Novel

"For readers of S.A. Cosby, Eli Cranor, and Liz Moore, a suspenseful debut about a woman who returns home to take over her family's honey business-but when a body is discovered on the property, three generations of women are forced to confront the secrets, betrayals, and buried crimes that haunt their family When a queen bee can no longer do her job, the workers will kill her, producing a baby queen to take her place. A perfectly preserved but very dead body is found in a barrel of honey, and the town of Noccalula, Alabama, will never be the same. Natalie Link has inherited the family honey business from her beloved grandmother Lana, who raised Nat after her mother ran off to Los Angeles. But it turns out Nat had no idea what Lana's been hiding in the bee goop. Is Nat up to running an enterprise of questionable repute, evading the investigator who's been on her family's case since she was a kid, and surviving her suddenly lethal life? Bob Sauk is a PI on a twenty-year losing streak who torpedoed his own promising cop career once upon a time when a man vanished under very suspicious circumstances and Sauk knew in his core that Lana Link was to blame. Will he finally get the chance to prove he was right all along? Ed Sorter is a small-town sheriff who has to get this all figured out without pissing off absolutely everyone in town, or at least not too bad. Baby Queen is a sharp-as-a-blade tale of family crime that feels a bit like Ozark as directed by the Coen brothers. Toss in a Hollywood star with a legendary mean streak, ice-cold hitmen posing as used car salesmen, and entire buckets of frog legs, and you have a debut novel that reads like a Southern homage to The Godfather but with honey instead of cannoli"-- Provided by publisher.