Julia Bennett finally has her life on her own terms. After walking away from a high-pressure Chicago marketing career and a very public breakdown, she has built something small, quiet, and real: The Perch Lakeside Café, a coffee sanctuary on the shores of Lake Amara in Heron's Cove, Wisconsin. Her espresso is exceptional. Her therapy dog, Macchiato, is a golden retriever with a service vest and better emotional intelligence than most humans. Her regulars trust her with their mornings. Her mood journal is color-coded and current. She is, for the first time in years, stable.

Then bestselling author Erin Delaney comes to town for a lakeside book signing-charming, secretive, and carrying enough hidden baggage to fill the Meridian Inn twice over. When Erin is found dead at the foot of a bluff along the lake path, the county sheriff's department calls it a tragic accident. Julia's notebook, the one she keeps for "things that don't add up," says otherwise.

Now Julia is doing something her therapist did not assign and her 48-hour decision rule explicitly advises against: investigating a murder. The suspect list includes a bitter literary rival, a nervous innkeeper's son, a reclusive poet with a grudge, a financier with secrets in his briefcase, and a bookshop owner whose loyalty may be more dangerous than her lies. Macchiato is alerting on people he has never distrusted before. The town's gossip network is closing ranks. And Detective Nolan Reyes-Julia's most reliable regular, her long-running dark-roast-versus-medium-roast sparring partner, and the man she has been carefully not falling for-keeps showing up at her counter with questions that have nothing to do with coffee.

To find the killer, Julia will have to trust her own perception-the one thing her diagnosis has taught her to question. To survive, she'll need Macchiato, a very good memory for people's orders, and the courage to believe that the life she's built is worth defending.