In high school, Lacey Monterossa started a club called Straw Hats and Old Lace. She collected girls who didn’t fit, and they wore dresses and hats and lived for beauty and simplicity.
Now the girls are all grown up, and life isn’t so simple, especially when someone is murdered at Lacey’s inn. One by one the ladies are finding love, danger, faith, and the value of old friends.
This series of eight Christian romance/mystery novellas will be available at normal channels as well as offered free on Dawnlight Library, another site run by Jill Penrod. Available in 2025.
Her heart won't let her hate him...
When Lacey unexpectedly inherits the Monterossa family mansion from her grandmother, she and friend Daisy turn it into a tea room and inn. Two months after opening the inn, an older gentleman guest is found murdered in his guestroom.
The same day Max Castleton is murdered, Lacey’s high school sweetheart returns to town after breaking her heart at graduation. Heath is a beautiful, broken ex-baseball player, and while she wants to hate him, her heart remembers years of friendship and can’t quite close the door on him.
The murder and the need to raise funds for the inn bring the pair together, along with Lacey’s friends, members of the Straw Hats and Old Lace club Lacey founded in high school, a group of ladies who long for beauty, peace, and romance in their lives, a club Heath has never understood.
But only if the pair leaves the past and moves into the present can the inn succeed and a murderer be brought to justice.
He's not part of the plan
There’s nothing wrong with planning ahead…
Aurora Hart has a plan. Her budding design and event business will one day allow her to buy her dream home, a little historic house in her small town of Coon Valley. She’s ambitious and precise and knows what she wants.
Rhodes Dumont, the new owner of the local flower shop, does not have a plan. He’s everything that makes Aurora crazy, an artist who misses details and lets life happen to him. The fact that the eccentric man is beautiful, charming, and dresses in Regency period clothing he sews himself? She refuses to be affected by him.
Challenged to design a room for her friends’ new inn, the pair chooses to work together, and not with the best results. Add in a burglary related to the murder at the inn, and there’s enough danger and tension to tank their friendship before it starts. God will have to do some deep work on these hearts to get Aurora and Rhodes where he wants them, both individually and as a team.
She Burned Some Bridges...
Laurel was the club member who got away, leaving town at graduation with a whole lot of anger behind her. Now she’s back with her little daughter, hoping for forgiveness, because she has nowhere else to go. Her friends take her back, but she’s waiting for the other shoe to fall.
Byron is the straightlaced town librarian as well as a reckless volunteer fireman. He’s suspicious of the attentions of lovely single mom Laurel, especially since she prefers his firefighter self over his boring librarian persona. What happens when she tires of the man who loves books and raises chickens and lives a quiet life?
When she offers to help him plan some fundraisers for the library, they discover they might not see themselves—or one another—clearly, and God might have some work ahead to reach their hearts and souls. Unfortunately, a few dangerous fires, related to the murder at their friends’ inn, might destroy everything before it begins.
Coming 2025
Precious has something to prove
After losing her father, Precious Vanderbeck is determined to show the world she’s an intelligent, independent woman who can take care of herself. When she finds a man sporting a gunshot wound in her van after work, she takes him home to care for him, knowing her friends would never approve.
The injured man proves to be a Chicago detective who charms her pets and tugs at Precious’s heart strings, and she keeps him long after she should go for help.
Dean can’t remember being shot. Nor does he know what he’s doing in Coon Valley, nowhere near his home of Chicago. All he knows is Precious is in danger because of him, and he can’t survive without her help. He’s not sure how to handle the conundrum, although falling for the spitfire woman probably isn’t his best plan.
Coming 2025
Jane wants out...
More than anything, Jane Barrett wants to sell her family’s grocery store and live her own life. But she’s trapped, and she’s resigned to making the best of it.
A free-spirit tourist shows up and offers to help for a few days when her brother is sick, and she finds herself falling, although this man can go where he pleases and will surely walk away. She even shares her poetry with him, the deepest secrets of her heart. But when she discovers he isn’t who he says, that he might even be an enemy, she’s shattered and angry and shuts him down.
Unfortunately, the stranger might need her understanding more than he’s ever needed anything, and she might be the only one to rescue him.
2026
She left ghosts behind when she walked out of town
Sophia Santamaria left Coon Valley at graduation, but with her high-school friend Lacey getting married, she has to head back to town and face a few ghosts she left behind.
Strangely, her boss Vince, who has no concept of boundaries, invites himself along, and with him at her side, she walks through the painful memories that forced her to leave town.
During this journey into the past, Sophia realizes she knows nothing about her boss, and she’s never treated him fairly. But as they get closer, she fears he’ll see the mean girl she used to be, and her present and past collide and send her fleeing.
Vince isn’t sure what to make of the revelations about Sophia, nor does he know what to do with the strange visions God puts on his heart concerning her friends’ inn, but if he figures it out, he might turn out to be an answer to prayer nobody expected.
2026
