Welcome to Cedar Falls

Cedar Falls, Alabama doesn't look like the kind of place where people get murdered.

The sweet tea is cold, the casseroles are covered, and on any given Sunday morning, half the town is in church — the other half is talking about the half that is. Nestled at the foot of Cedars National Forest where three creeks divide and run three different directions, Cedar Falls is the sort of place that knows everything about everybody and says nothing out loud. Not directly. Not where anyone can hear.

That's the problem with Cedar Falls. Everything gets buried eventually.

The Cedar Falls Murder Mystery series is Southern fiction with a dark streak and a covered-dish smile — think Fannie Flagg writing for Murder She Wrote, set deep in the red clay of Winston County, Alabama, where the Pentecostals and the Baptists have been conducting a sixty-year cold war, J.W. McAllister's oak-lined estate casts a long shadow over everything, and the revival tent goes up every summer whether the Lord calls for it or not.

At the center of it all is a town that runs on gossip, grace, and grudges — sometimes in that order.

Book One — Bless Their Hearts and Bury Their Secrets (Coming July 8, 2026)
J.W. McAllister — pillar of the community, chairman of the deacon board, and the man who held every secret in First Cedar Falls Church of God like a fist — turns up dead on a Sunday morning in October 2014. Drowned in the baptistery. The casseroles arrive before the sheriff does.

What follows is thirteen chapters of small-town reckoning: a missing $3.27 million, thirty years of Shirley's composition notebooks, a fingerprint that belongs to the wrong woman, and a congregation that built its entire identity on a man who was quietly destroying them all. By the time the truth surfaces, half the church has lied, half the county has a motive, and at least one person wishes they'd never opened Shirley's Piggly Wiggly bag.

Behind every "bless your heart" is a knife. Behind every covered dish is a grudge. And behind the stained glass of First Cedar Falls Church, somebody is about to learn that secrets buried in red Alabama clay don't ever really stay buried.