Before Clara came home, there was Evie.
Evie Blackwood has spent sixty years doing a job most people don't know exists. She maintains an ancient ward system woven into the walls of a Victorian estate on a ridge above Whispering Falls, Pennsylvania. She keeps the boundary lines intact, logs every anomaly in a notebook no one else will ever read, and holds weekly briefings with seven cats who report directly to her.
The cats talk. The falls listen. The town stays safe.
She's good at it. She's always been good at it. And she has absolutely no intention of slowing down ... right up until the morning her body starts disagreeing.
Evie doesn't have time for dying. She has a boundary to maintain, a ward system to document for the woman who will one day inherit it, and a problem at the eastern edge of the property that none of her cats will explain properly. Something has appeared there that shouldn't exist. Obi, her oldest, her most inscrutable, the one she has never fully understood, sits at the line every night and listens to a frequency she can't quite reach anymore.
She needs to solve it before she goes. She needs to make sure the line holds. She needs to write the letters.
Falls & Familiars is the story of a woman who built a magical life with her hands, her cats, sixty years of quiet devotion, and the mystery she refuses to leave unsolved.
Set in the world of the Whispering Falls: Cozy Magical Cat Mysteries series, this prequel can be read before Book One or after.
You'll love this story if you enjoy cozy mysteries with magic and heart, older heroines who are magnificent and know it, talking cats with strong professional opinions, small towns built on secrets older than their founding, and stories that make you feel warm and a little wrecked at the same time.
A Note to Readers: Falls & Familiars is the prequel to Whiskers & Wards, Book One of the Whispering Falls: Cozy Magical Cat Mysteries series. The main series books run 85,000+ words. This prequel is intentionally shorter; a quick, intimate look at Whispering Falls before Clara arrives, told by the woman who kept it running for sixty years.
