Paranormal Women's Fiction · Cozy Mystery
Midlife, Hexes, and Hot Messes
She's a disaster. They've been waiting for her.
She's not cursed. She's just powerful. Gail Pelkey is forty-eight, freshly fired, and driving south with no plan and a bag of gas station Cheetos. She's spent her entire adult life managing other people's events, only to watch every single one end in catastrophe. Chandeliers fall. Sound systems explode. Ice sculptures melt on contact. When she stumbles into Siren Springs, Arizona, she expects a quiet place to fall apart in peace. Instead, she finds a coven of midlife witches who tell her the chaos isn't bad luck. It's magic. And they've been waiting for someone exactly like her. Now the ley lines beneath Siren Springs are failing, coyotes are speaking English, and the local coffee shop's espresso machine has developed a personality. Gail's the only one who can find the source of the damage. Too bad every time she uses her power, something else catches fire. There's also the retired fire captain next door. He doesn't flinch when things explode around her. She doesn't know what to do with that.
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Meet Zeta Carlton
Zeta Carlton believes that discovering your magic—and stumbling across the occasional dead body—is the perfect cure for a midlife rut. She writes paranormal women's fiction and cozy mysteries dedicated to seasoned heroines who are old enough to know better, but suddenly powerful enough not to care.
When she isn't busy dreaming up supernatural cold cases or snarky familiars, Zeta can usually be found hunting for vintage treasures, drinking entirely too much coffee, and convincing herself that the creaking in her house is just the wind. She loves writing stories that prove life's greatest adventures (and trickiest whodunits) often begin well after forty.
The Siren Springs Coven
Midlife, Hexes, and Hot Messes
She's a disaster. They've been waiting for her.
Paranormal Women's FictionShe's not cursed. She's just powerful. Gail Pelkey is forty-eight, freshly fired, and driving south with no plan and a bag of gas station Cheetos. She's spent her entire adult life managing other people's events, only to watch every single one end in catastrophe. Chandeliers fall. Sound systems explode. Ice sculptures melt on contact. When she stumbles into Siren Springs, Arizona, she expects a quiet place to fall apart in peace. Instead, she finds a coven of midlife witches who tell her the chaos isn't bad luck. It's magic. And they've been waiting for someone exactly like her. Now the ley lines beneath Siren Springs are failing, coyotes are speaking English, and the local coffee shop's espresso machine has developed a personality. Gail's the only one who can find the source of the damage. Too bad every time she uses her power, something else catches fire. There's also the retired fire captain next door. He doesn't flinch when things explode around her. She doesn't know what to do with that.
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Potions, Exes, and Hexed Texts
Fifty-four years of buried pain. Two weeks to survive it.
Paranormal Women's FictionSomething's pushing up from beneath Siren Springs. The ley lines are leaking emotional residue, and the whole town is falling apart. Old friendships are fracturing. A barista is crying about a boyfriend from 1997. And chaos witch Gail Pelkey is accidentally broadcasting everyone's worst memories to anyone who gets too close. The coven's got problems of its own. Sandy's telekinesis is glitching. Jeannie's empathy has gone haywire. And the sharp new witch who just rolled into town with divination she can't control is seeing a future that looks like the desert cracking open. The ley lines are building toward a purge—a massive release of decades of trapped emotional energy. The coven can't stop it. They can only try to survive it. And Gail, who's spent six years avoiding her own buried grief, is the only one who can channel it. No pressure. Except for the ex-husband who just showed up, the fire captain who's finally letting her in, and the entire town counting on a woman who still can't get through a day without breaking something.
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Sparks, Secrets, and Second Sight
She thought mastery meant control. The magic disagreed.
Paranormal Women's FictionThree months in Siren Springs, and Gail Pelkey's finally stopped breaking everything she touches. Her chaos magic is behaving. Her event planning business has its first client. She's got a coven, a home, and a retired fire captain who shows up every morning with coffee. There's just one problem. She's holding on so tight that the magic is overcorrecting. Instead of chaos, it's creating forced perfection. And patches of dead desert are spreading wherever her magic suppresses the ley lines. Then her mother shows up. Seventy-two, immaculate, and armed with suggestions that sound like commands. She doesn't know her daughter is a witch. She's about to find out. With the ley line convergence starving and everyone telling her to stop performing, Gail has to face the hardest truth her magic can teach: you don't master power by controlling it. You master it by trusting yourself enough to let go.
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Grants, Grifters, and Ground Rules
My coven doesn't do subtle, and neither do I anymore.
Paranormal Women's FictionAt forty-eight, I finally have a business people actually want to hire, a man who says plainly he's not going anywhere, and a coven who has my back no matter what. So obviously, that's exactly when a charming stranger shows up asking questions no historian should need answered. Renee Castillo says she's cataloguing old adobes for a heritage survey. My best friend says her paperwork doesn't add up. My gut, which has gotten a lot harder to ignore since I found out I'm a witch, says both of them are right. I've got three weeks to plan the biggest gala of my career, figure out what Renee's actually after before she torches my hard-won reputation, and keep the whole thing from blowing up in front of two hundred guests and a very good caterer. My coven's in. My love life's finally steady enough to lean on. My magic's finally mine to control, mostly. Turns out a party can survive almost anything. What I find in the box she leaves behind might be a different story.
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A Psychic Midlife
New job. New powers. Old murder.
Cozy Paranormal MysteryWhen a vision hits Mel Bracewell at an estate sale, she thinks she's having a stroke. Nope. She's just developed psychometry at fifty-three. She can touch objects and see their histories, feel the emotions embedded in them. Chicago's Office of Paranormal Affairs recruits her immediately. Suddenly Mel's trading her corporate cubicle for a converted firehouse staffed by a telekinetic detective, a too-enthusiastic medical examiner, and a front-desk witch who's secretly terrifying. Her first case: a twenty-year-old murder someone went to great lengths to hide. And someone's been leaving evidence specifically for Mel to find. Manipulating her visions. Leading her toward a secret that could destroy one of Chicago's most respected supernatural families. Good thing she spent decades managing impossible people. These just happen to have powers.
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A Dangerous Midlife
Some monsters stop. Others just wait.
Cozy Paranormal MysteryThree months at Chicago's Office of Paranormal Affairs, and Mel Bracewell has finally figured out her life. She's got a job she's good at, a boyfriend who makes her laugh, and psychic abilities she can actually control. Then the bodies start turning up. Thirty years ago, someone hunted people with newly-awakened magical abilities. Six victims. Zero arrests. The murders stopped as suddenly as they started. Now they've started again. The only way to catch this killer is to read the old crime scenes. Which means Mel has to experience thirty years of murders firsthand. Every death. Every moment of terror. Every clue the original investigators missed. Her gift has never cost her this much. But walking away isn't an option. Not when the killer's pattern points to one terrifying possibility: he's just getting started.
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A Visionary Midlife
Some visions are a warning. Hers is a deadline.
Cozy Paranormal MysteryMel Bracewell's job at the Chicago Office of Paranormal Affairs usually involves looking backward. As a psychometric, she touches an object and experiences its past. But when she picks up a dead precog's sketchbook, the timeline violently flips. For the first time in her life, Mel isn't seeing a crime that has already happened. She's seeing an assassination that's going to happen. And the clock is ticking. The target is an intake coordinator at a supernatural community center, and the assassin is a professional "cleaner" making sure a decades-old secret stays buried. But what starts as a race to prevent a murder becomes terrifyingly personal when Mel's adult son, Doug, begins having the exact same visions. As Doug's latent magical abilities awaken, the timeline accelerates, turning a seventeen-day warning into a one-day deadline. With her PI boyfriend Aaron, her ghostly colleague Charlie, and her highly opinionated psychic cat Biscuit at her side, Mel must unravel a thirty-year-old conspiracy targeting the city's most vulnerable magical practitioners—one that leads directly to the unsolved death of Aaron's former partner. Can Mel change the future before the killer strikes, or are some timelines written in stone?
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A Buried Midlife
One buried secret. One dead partner. One very patient killer.
Cozy Paranormal MysterySomebody's kept a Bridgeport warehouse suspiciously spotless for fifteen years. Mel Bracewell reads a person's worst moment off anything they've touched, and she's never once trusted a crime scene this clean. This time it means headaches, dead ends, and a cat named Biscuit sitting on the evidence until somebody photographs it properly. It also means the swept floors and wiped-clean locks are hiding the same secret that killed her partner's ghost fifteen years ago, before anyone thought to ask the right questions. Aaron's partner, Charlie, has to relive the worst night of his afterlife to hand them a name. Mel has to keep her whole team alive long enough to use it, after somebody cuts a brake line and breaks into an evidence room to make the message clear: stop looking, or else. Fifteen years of careful, patient cover-up just ran into one investigator who doesn't know how to leave anything alone. Can Mel close a case that's been open since before she ever touched her first cold object—before the man behind it decides she's the next thing that needs cleaning up?
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