Strange Inheritance at River’s Edge follows Rebecca “Becky” Whitmore, a wounded veteran and former security professional who returns to Hannibal, Missouri, after inheriting her missing Aunt Iris’s strange old magic shop. What begins as a practical errand, settle the taxes, assess the building, maybe sell it, turns into a reckoning with family history, grief, buried secrets, and an Emporium that seems to have its own will. With a black Lab, a regal cat, a watchful river, and a town full of sharp tongues and soft loyalties, the novel opens a mystery that feels both supernatural and deeply personal.

I liked the way the book lets Becky be formidable without making her emotionally invulnerable. She can read a room like a threat map, handle herself under pressure, and still be undone by an old letter, a remembered recipe, or the ache of being called “Becky” by people who knew her before war and loss remade her. The story’s tenderness has grit in it. It’s splintered, wary, and earned. The Emporium’s magic works best when it feels less like spectacle and more like inheritance, objects remembering, rooms holding their breath, the past refusing to stay politely boxed.

I also enjoyed the texture of Hannibal as a living community rather than a postcard backdrop. The banter is brash, funny, and sometimes wonderfully cantankerous, with Rita, Delilah, Tessa, Jake, and the others giving the book a noisy human pulse. The novel lingers in emotional aftermath more than a conventional mystery might, but for me that patience became part of its identity. This isn’t only a whodunit or a haunted-shop tale; it’s a story about what protection costs, what mercy means, and whether a broken person can still become a shelter for others.

I would recommend Strange Inheritance at River’s Edge to readers who enjoy cozy mystery, magical realism, and veteran-centered women’s fiction with a supernatural edge. Fans of Sarah Addison Allen’s warm, uncanny small-town atmosphere may feel at home here, though Artemis Taylor brings more scars, more river mud, and a sharper sense of danger to the table. Strange Inheritance at River’s Edge is a tender, haunted mystery about coming home to a place that has been waiting, not to save you, but to ask you to stay.

Pages: 254 | ASIN: B0H56SWMPL