Savannah Mills
Hi, I’m Savannah Mills, and I am so excited! My best friend, Gia Morelli, recently moved to my hometown of Boggy Creek, Florida. She was having a bit of trouble, thanks to her no-good, cheating, lying, scheming ex-husband, a man I never wanted her to marry in the first place, but what are you gonna do? She made her mistakes, just like we all do, and now it’s time to move on. Thankfully, she came to her senses.
So, Gia opened an All-Day Breakfast café. She bought a beautiful historic building right on Main Street, just down the road from the park. She could only fly down for an occasional weekend, thanks to the mess her ex made up in New York, so I helped her out.
After she ordered tables for the café dining room, my brother, Joey, and I set them up. I spread navy blue cloths over them and made matching covers for the seat cushions. I even found a gorgeous, hand-painted wooden open/closed sign for the front window and picked up some paintings of local scenery at the street fair last weekend.
She was thrilled with how cozy and homey everything looked. Now, glass cake dishes line the counter. I can’t wait for a piece of the breakfast pies that fills them. Gia makes an amazing breakfast! I can smell the bacon cooking already, and her home fries. Mmmm…out of this world.
Oops, now my stomach’s growling. I probably shouldn’t have thought of the home fries.
I do have to admit, though, I was a nervous wreck. Gia loved the building that houses the café, but she hadn’t yet seen her house when she moved down. Don’t get me wrong, it’s adorable, but it’s a little out of the way. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much money left after buying the café, so I had to do my best.
The development is beautiful, acre after acre of woods, filled with thickly wooded, huge pine trees that brush the clouds. And I’m pretty sure she’ll get used to the abundance of critters that roam the development that sits right on the edge of the Ocala National Forest. I saw a couple of bear cubs playing in an open field last time I was out there, and I pulled over just to sit and watch them. But the drive to the café takes about twenty-five minutes, and, well, Gia’s from Manhattan, where you can find almost anything you need, any time of the day or night, without traveling twenty-five minutes.
That was one of the things I loved about the five years I lived with Gia in New York. One of the hardest things for me to get used to was the lack of trees. I’d look up, and instead of trees dripping with moss, I’d find buildings that pierced the clouds and sometimes seemed like they were about to fall over on me.
Anyway, since Gia’s been here, I’ve pretty much claimed her spare bedroom as my own. But now, Leo and I are getting married, and amid all of the excitement of trying to find the perfect venue, and the perfect wedding gown, and the perfect everything else, I’m a little sad I’ll be moving out. At least, I will if we can ever get through this wedding without anything else going wrong.
About the book
Whole Latte MurderEx-New Yorker and local diner owner Gia Morelli is still getting used to the sweltering Florida sun. But this summer she’ll have to deal with a more dangerous kind of heat—when she’s hot on the trail of another murderer . . .
Summer in Boggy Creek has arrived, and Gia’s best friend, successful real estate agent Savannah, is getting hitched. Now she’s enlisted Gia’s sleuthing talents in a desperate search for the perfect wedding dress. But when Savannah mysteriously vanishes after showing a mansion to a bigwig client, Gia investigates the house Savannah was trying to sell. The first clue she finds is Savannah’s car in the driveway. Inside the house, they stumble on Savannah’s potential buyer—dead. Someone had apparently closed the deal—with a two by four full of nails to the client’s head. Soon afterward, a woman’s body is fished from the lake near the same house. The townsfolk are now sweating bullets over the murders, and the heat comes down on poor Gia to find her missing friend, and track down the killer . . .
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Thank you so much for having me and for sharing the release of Whole Latte Murder!
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