This is book one of the Kitten Witch Cozy Mystery series and the main character is witch Ember McNair who runs the Broken Broom Pub, which has been in her family for quite a few generations. She has a cat familiar called Kali, the ghostly presence of an ancient ancestor called Talako and one of her best friends is bat shifter Sage. She lives in the small town of Cauchemar, out by the swamplands of Louisiana. During the day the pub serves all ages, mainly serving food and home cooked desserts, which always go down well. After nine pm, all those underage have to leave and it is strictly a pub, serving alcohol. One night, her bartender Lyndsy and waitress Tara, were in a heated discussion, neither wanting to serve a certain trio of women at one of the tables. The trio are Laura Hall and her two shadows, who were school bullies and have grown up to continue their antics, picking on their same victims, as adults. Ember decides to serve the snotty woman and her friends herself to avoid any stress on her staff, as she can easily ignore what these women try to spread as rumours about her.
The next morning her familiar brings her the news that the three women died in a car crash after leaving her pub, but she knows they weren’t too drunk to drive, having a strict policy of taking keys off any customers who is too drunk to drive home safely ad all of her staff adhere to this policy. She is visited by the local sheriff Cedric Jamieson, who is also a wolf shifter. He also brings news of another death, Jake Peterson, another man who wasn’t all that well liked in the town, but nothing links the four deaths other than the fact they were at her pub the previous night! These deaths and all the gossip in the following days, from everyone around town, soon affects Ember’s business and the lack of customers could soon mean she has to close up shop for good. Cedric is waiting for autopsy’s to figure out how the four victims died, but when it turns out that the car crash definitely didn’t kill any of the women and that the driver was dead before the crash, matters come swinging straight back to Ember and her pub. Could her bartender have finally been pushed too far by the bullies, who tormented from her school days and even to the present day, and taken revenge against them? Ember needs to work out who else could be a suspect, if she is going to be able to save her pub.
She uses some of her witch skills to get into the premises of some of the victims and even some suspects, but not everything goes as she plans and Sheriff Jamieson is certainly not happy with her getting herself involved in the investigation. She makes list so fall the evidence or clues she has so far and anyone she can connect in any way to the crimes, whether this is by the gossip around town route, the really good hearing of her bat shifter bestie Sage, or what she finds on her little illegal trips into certain premises. When Ember is targeted by the killer, only the quick actions of her familiar leave her still standing. It seems some of these bullies were quite happy to sleep around and weren’t exactly pillars of the local society, so maybe now she needed to add all the partners who may have found out about some of these affairs and not dealt well with the news, to her long list of suspects. She tries to gather evidence by herself, having called Cedric and not got an answer one time, but manages to get ahold of him when she finally figures out who the killer may be. A dangerous ending to the first book in the series, but also the beginning of a romantic relationship for the witch who refuses to keep herself out of danger zone. Nice to catch up with the beginning of this series, having already ready some of the later books of the series. I received an ARC copy of this book from BookSprout and I have freely given my own opinion of the book above.