Ghoul Intentions

Midlife at Mourning Cove

When Margot Bellamy inherits Mourning Cove Inn from a great-aunt she met once at age thirteen, she has very little reason to go and no particular reason to stay in Ohio. Her husband of twelve years has recently departed with a note that said following my truth. Her AP English classes are covered. Her mother's voicemails are unread.

She drives eleven hours on a Tuesday in February and arrives at a silver-weathered inn on the Maine coast that sits on a bluff above a grey crescent beach, smells of rosemary and woodsmoke, and feels — impossibly, immediately — like somewhere she has always been going.

The inn has been waiting for her.

So has Eleanor, who has been sitting in the kitchen chair since the 1940s and communicates through a cup system. And Pearl, who has been making breakfast since 1934. And Hemingway, an enormous grey-green cat who knows everything and reveals it selectively. And something in the fourth room that has been patient for forty years and is running out of patience.

Margot is a practical woman. She makes columns in a legal pad. She tends what needs tending. She is not prepared for any of this — the warmth that moves from her palms into things that need healing, the ghost who has been waiting fifty years to finish a painting, the harbormaster who says everything important in four words, the five words dropped into a cold basement at five-fifteen in the morning that she will not stop thinking about.

Ghoul Intentions is the first book in the Midlife at Mourning Cove series — an atmospheric, funny, deeply human story about a woman who discovers that the life she was meant to live was arranged for her by someone who saw her clearly at a picnic table in Ohio in 1987 and spent thirty-five years getting everything into place.

She just had to get there first.

The series continues in Ghoul Intentions Mourning Glory — Book Two.