Dog Gone Troubles: Crystal Beach Magic Mystery Series, #0

By Karen McSpade

Meet Sidney Grace: Quirky Journalist. Curious Witch. Professional Butterfingers.

 

Sidney Grace, a young journalist living in Boston, isn't ready for all the troubles heading her way. For starters, she's curious about her grandmother's magic even though her spellcasting is a bit rusty. Sidney finds herself caught between her curiosity to learn more and her mother's hatred for all things supernatural. After all, her mom has a Tupperware business to run and magic isn't part of her business plan! The fact that her dad doesn't seem to be bothered by an occasional spell gone wild, isn't smoothing the water between these two matriarchs.

 

But the family drama and her untapped magic are the least of Sidney's problems. Things turn worse when her new boss asks Sidney to cover the annual Pup Parade and she makes a terrible mistake that could cost her career…and ultimately her life. Can her grandmother cast a spell that works right the first time and save Sidney? Or will her troubles finally get the best of this new witch?

 

Dog Gone Troubles is a fun, heartwarming paranormal cozy mystery with quirky and charming characters that will keep you spellbound! This book is the prequel for the highly-anticipated Crystal Beach Magic Mystery Series.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karen McSpade
• Release date: Oct 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215924723

Book preview

Chapter

One

Chapter header image of a crescent moon with roses, a hanging crystal, and stars in the background.

Inever saw any of the troubles coming. It started out as a typical Friday morning until I got to my grandparent’s house.

What do you mean you’re moving away?

My grandmother, Ada-Mae, looked at her feet and shuffled them slightly in that sort of nervous way that she tended to do when bringing bad news. Then again, as she was in her mid-seventies now, the shuffling was just how she generally moved about.

Sidney… she began as if needing to calm some rabid beast. Which I was not, by the way. Although, my face was probably turning a little red, and my right eye was squinting the way that it did when I was upset. I hated that it made me look like Popeye.

We stood in the kitchen of my grandparents’ early twentieth-century Boston townhouse, a charming red brick affair with bay windows along the front. The large windows had wooden surrounds that Ada-Mae made Gramps paint a different color every couple of years to mix things up a little. Right now, they were yellow, but I noticed on the way inside that the paint was starting to flake, and—crazy though it might have seemed at that moment—I found myself wondering if they would paint them again before they packed up and moved away.

So, where will you move to? I asked her in a voice and with the attitude of someone who assumed that there was nowhere else in America—let alone the whole world—where the two of them could possibly want to move.

We’ve got our eye on a place in Florida, dear. A little town on the Atlantic Coast that’s not far from the Space Center there. Crystal Beach, they call it.

Florida? I exclaimed, screwing my face up like I was sucking a Sour Patch Kids candy. If the word had featured a few hard consonants, spittle might have erupted from my mouth. Why Florida? To be fair, I would have taken the same tone with just about anywhere else they wanted to go. Paris? Why would anyone want to move to Paris? The Upper East Side of Manhattan? Whoa, what a dump! I thought Boston was the best place on the planet, and I couldn’t imagine living elsewhere. But, then again, I hadn’t lived anywhere else, so what did I know.

This wasn’t fair; at the tender age of twenty-four, I wasn’t ready to lose my grandparents to Florida. It wasn’t like I could pack up and, you know, follow them down. Single White Grandchild them, or whatever. (Yes, single - me and my cat are playing the field while acting uninterested in finding love.)

I had recently landed my dream journalist job as a writer at Living It Large in Boston Magazine. And that was despite my natural klutziness doing its best to ruin things for me—for instance, the cappuccino straight down my white blouse five minutes before the interview. Sometimes it was like my hands were remote-controlled by evil pixies. Sometimes it’s just downright embarrassing having to live with the surname Grace.

I think our old bones need some sunshine to soothe them, Ada-Mae said, her voice trying to be as soothing as the Florida sunshine she was talking about.

B-but… we’re all here. Mom and Dad too. My parents, Jacob and Julia-Mae Grace, lived in a central apartment, while my more modest apartment was a little further out. Dad had done well in finance, although he also had a personality. Double bonus. And my mom was the undisputed Tupperware Queen of our district. Seriously, people waited months to get her to host a Tupperware party at their house and