Interior designer Natalie Brooks has one job left in the city: turn a downtown office tower into a cozy northern lodge. Reclaimed beams, a living wall, a creek that runs on a pump — a whole forest, built to order, forty floors above the winter street.

It's all a staged illusion, and illusion is exactly what Natalie is paid to create. But when her trained eye catches that one salvaged beam is lying about where it came from, she can't let it go. Tracing the truth beneath the marketing myth leads her to a sealed tin, an old photograph, and a family whose real story was quietly erased.

It's the only honest thing in the whole building — and the last push she needs to leave the city behind.

The Lodge is the free prequel to the Alder Bay series — a cozy small-town mystery wrapped in a slow-burn romance. Meet Natalie before she arrives in Alder Bay, and see where the story begins.

"The Lodge"

by Loretta McLean