Mavens: Grandmothers know best, even in the afterlife. - Paperback

by Heather Curlee Novak (Author)

UNCOVER THE PAST. UNLEASH THE TRUTH.

At fifty, ER nurse Josephine "Josie" Palmer expected her next chapter to be peaceful, predictable, and blissfully quiet. She's done with diets, comfortable in her own skin, and navigating an empty nest with her dog, two cats, and a well-earned routine in Valparaiso, Indiana. But when her best friends gift her an ancestry DNA kit and a tarot deck for her 50th birthday, spitting into a tube does far more than trace her family tree-it cracks open the veil to the afterlife.

Turns out, Josie's dead grandmothers have been hanging around all along.

Operating like a sharp-witted, bickering Greek chorus from beyond the grave, stern ranch matriarch Grammie Clara Sterling and cigarette-smoking socialite Colette "Mimi" Beauchamp start leaving unmistakable sensory cues-from phantom menthol smoke to shifting heirloom quilts. But their return isn't just a ghostly reunion.

When a high-profile Chicago campaign gala exposes deep-seated family secrets and a long-standing cycle of power and abuse, Josie realizes her family's political prestige is built on decades of enforced silence. Guided by her spirited ancestral duo and backed by a tight-knit circle of fiercely loyal women, Josie must step into her own strength. To protect the next generation and break a legacy of generational rot, she will have to embrace the matrilineal power she never knew she possessed-and prove that the women in this family never stop fighting.

Mavens is dark-cozy paranormal women's fiction novel perfect for fans of snarky heroines, opinionated ghosts, late-in-life reinventions, and dark family secrets.