Margot Slade is done trusting people.
After her husband's death revealed a financial fraud that consumed everything, Margot starts over in Agate Reach, a small town on the Oregon coast. She has a tuxedo cat with no respect for personal space, a part-time job at the county clerk's office, and absolutely no plans to get involved in anyone else's problems.
That lasts about a week.
When a charming "merchant marine officer" starts draining her friend's life savings through an online romance scam, Margot recognizes the pattern. She's seen this kind of deception before — up close, across her own dinner table, for twenty-four years. And this time, she's not going to look away.
Armed with public records, a librarian's research instincts, and a stubbornness that borders on professional, Margot follows the paper trail from small-town Oregon to a strip-mall office in Tigard — and discovers the scam is bigger, and closer, than anyone imagined.
The Sweetheart Swindle is the first book in the Agate Reach Mystery series — cozy mysteries built around real-world scams, set on the Oregon coast, featuring a protagonist who's been burned once and won't let it happen to anyone else.
Margot Slade is done trusting people.
After her husband's death revealed a financial fraud that consumed everything, Margot starts over in Agate Reach, a small town on the Oregon coast. She has a tuxedo cat with no respect for personal space, a part-time job at the county clerk's office, and absolutely no plans to get involved in anyone else's problems.
That lasts about a week.
When a charming "merchant marine officer" starts draining her friend's life savings through an online romance scam, Margot recognizes the pattern. She's seen this kind of deception before — up close, across her own dinner table, for twenty-four years. And this time, she's not going to look away.
Armed with public records, a librarian's research instincts, and a stubbornness that borders on professional, Margot follows the paper trail from small-town Oregon to a strip-mall office in Tigard — and discovers the scam is bigger, and closer, than anyone imagined.
The Sweetheart Swindle is the first book in the Agate Reach Mystery series — cozy mysteries built around real-world scams, set on the Oregon coast, featuring a protagonist who's been burned once and won't let it happen to anyone else.
The first thing Margot Slade unpacked in Agate Reach was the coffee maker.
Not the dishes. Not the towels. Not the framed photo of Wren at seven, gap-toothed and sunburned at Priest Lake, which was bubble-wrapped with a care that suggested Margot was protecting it from more than the moving truck. The coffee maker came out first because Margot had spent the last four months on her sister’s foldout couch in Spokane, and the only thing keeping her sane was a reliable cup of coffee at six in the morning, before Linda woke up and started offering opinions about Margot’s life choices.
Linda meant well. Everyone meant well. That was the problem with well-meaning people—they never seemed to run out of meaning.
Agate Cottage did not mean well. Agate Cottage was honest. It sagged where it sagged. The kitchen floor had a slope you could feel in your knees. Two of the three ceiling fans worked, and the third spun with a hesitation that suggested deep philosophical doubt. The listing on the real estate site had called it “charming coastal character,” which Margot had learned—professionally, expensively—was the kind of language people used when they wanted you to see something that wasn’t there.
But Agate Cottage wasn’t pretending. It was just old and tired and slightly damp, and Margot figured that made two of them.
She plugged in the coffee maker, discovered the outlet near the sink was dead, tried the one behind the refrigerator, found that it sparked in a way she chose to interpret as enthusiasm, and eventually located a functioning outlet in the hallway. She ran an extension cord under the kitchen doorframe and brewed her first cup of coffee in her new home while leaning against the counter, looking at the wall of boxes that now constituted her worldly possessions. One was labeled KITCHEN—FRAGILE in her own handwriting. Another, in her sister’s handwriting, said GOOD RIDDANCE.
Linda really did mean well.
Margin emerged from behind the refrigerator, where she’d been conducting a private inspection of the premises. She was a tuxedo cat of average size and above-average audacity—black and white, with one ear that tilted slightly forward as though she was permanently leaning into a question she hadn’t quite finished asking. She had already investigated the closet under the stairs, the gap between the washer and dryer, and something behind the water heater that Margot preferred not to think about.
Now Margin looked at Margot. She looked at the empty space where a food bowl should be. She looked at Margot again.
“Your bowl is in a box,” Margot told her. “In this kitchen. Probably.”
Margin sat down in the precise center of the kitchen floor and began cleaning her paw with the energy of someone filing a formal complaint.
Tom had named her. A margin call—a financial consultant’s idea of pet humor. For a long time after everything came out, Margot had considered renaming her. But Margin had been Margin for nine years, and it felt wrong to take away her name just because the man who’d given it turned out to be a liar and a thief. The cat hadn’t done anything wrong. The cat had excellent judgment, actually. Margin had never liked Tom. She’d knocked his reading glasses off the nightstand every single morning for nine years, which Margot now understood to have been a public service.
She found the bowl in the third box. She poured kibble. Margin approached and sniffed with the intensity of a health inspector on a tip and ate.
Outside, the February morning was doing that thing the Oregon coast did where the world turned into a series of grays—silver fog, pewter sky, the dark wet gray of the spruce trees behind the cottage, the lighter gray of the harbor barely visible three blocks downhill. Rain wasn’t falling so much as existing, suspended in the air like an opinion the weather hadn’t committed to yet.
Through the kitchen window—which needed new caulking, she noted automatically, the way she now noted the structural integrity of every building she entered—she could see the edge of the harbor, a few crab boats rocking at the dock, and the long curve of the jetty disappearing into fog. The boats looked patient, she thought. Or maybe resigned. It was hard to tell the difference from a distance.
A woman was walking up the gravel driveway.
She was around sixty, tall, with silver-blonde hair pulled back in a practical braid and the kind of confident stride that suggested she had either come to deliver good news or didn’t care whether her news was good or not. She wore rain boots and a flannel-lined jacket and carried a foil-covered dish.
Margot opened the front door before the woman could knock.
“You’re the one who bought Agate Cottage,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question.
“Apparently.”
“June Olstad. I run The Heron’s Perch up on the bluff. I brought you a cardamom coffee cake because I bring everyone a cardamom coffee cake, and because I want to know who’s living within shouting distance of my overflow parking.” She extended the dish. “It’s my grandmother’s recipe. If you don’t like cardamom, I apologize but only slightly.”
Margot took the coffee cake. It was warm. The smell of it—butter and sugar and that sharp, sweet spice—cut through the damp salt air, and something about the warmth of it, the plain fact of a stranger bringing food to her door because that’s what people here apparently did, made her throat tighten in a way she wasn’t prepared for.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it in about four more ways than the words could carry.
“You’re welcome. Now, are you going to invite me in so I can see what you’re working with, or are we going to stand here in the drizzle pretending you’re not desperate for someone to talk to who isn’t a cat?”
Margot looked down at Margin, who had materialized at her ankles and was already threading between June’s rain boots, sniffing each one with forensic attention. She chirped once—a short, interrogative sound—and bumped her head against June’s shin.
“How did you know about the cat?”
“Honey, in this town we knew about the cat before we knew about you. Fern at the post office saw the carrier through your car window yesterday and had the coloring, approximate age, and temperament distributed to half the town by dinnertime.”
Margot stepped back and let June Olstad into her house.
* * *
June had opinions about the cottage. She expressed them in the same way she apparently did everything—warmly, loudly, and without waiting to be asked.
“The ceiling fan has been broken since the Hendersons owned this place. Twelve years. I keep expecting someone to fix it. It just keeps spinning like it’s thinking about it.”
“Philosophical doubt,” Margot said.
June looked at her. Really looked—the way people do when they’re deciding whether you’re the kind of person worth knowing. Then she smiled, wide and warm, and entirely unguarded.
“Oh, you’re going to be fine here.”
They ate coffee cake standing at the counter because Margot didn’t have a table yet, and the moving boxes weren’t the sitting kind. Margot learned the essentials: Agate Reach had approximately three thousand people, swelling to ten thousand in the summer tourist season. The local economy ran on crabbing, oyster farming, tourism, and what June called “retirement money from people who read an article about the Oregon coast in a magazine and decided they wanted to die somewhere scenic.” The town had one grocery store, one gas station, two restaurants, a bookshop, and a post office run by a woman named Fern Castellano who knew the contents of every package that came through and had theories about all of them.
“Fern’s not a gossip,” June said carefully. “She’s … an information broker. She just does it for free, which makes her either a saint or a menace depending on what she’s decided to know about you.”
“What has she decided to know about me?”
“That you came from Spokane. That you paid cash for this cottage, which impressed everyone because cash buyers are rare and slightly suspicious. That you’re divorced or widowed—she hasn’t confirmed which. And that your cat is a tuxedo, which Fern considers the most trustworthy look a cat can have, so you’re already ahead.”
Margot considered correcting the record. Widowed, not divorced. Although what she really was didn’t fit neatly into either category. Widowed implied grief. Divorced implied a decision. Margot was something else entirely—the woman who’d been married to a thief for twenty-four years and hadn’t known it until the SEC showed up at her front door three weeks after his funeral.
She decided not to correct the record just yet.
“The cottage suits you,” June said, looking around the kitchen with the appraising eye of someone who’d renovated a building herself. “It needs work, but it’s got good bones. Solid foundation. Cedar shingles are original—they don’t build them like this anymore. You’ll want to get the roof looked at before the spring storms.”
“I’ve been making a list.”
“Of course you have.” June said this with approval, not condescension, and Margot felt something ease in her chest. She hadn’t realized how tightly she’d been holding herself. Four months on Linda’s couch. A year of investigations. Twenty-four years of a life that turned out to be constructed from the same material as a real estate listing: charming language designed to distract from the rot underneath.
June stood up and brushed coffee cake crumbs from her jeans. “I’ve got guests to feed. Come up to The Heron’s Perch for dinner tonight—I’m making salmon chowder and I always cook too much.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Of course I don’t have to. But you’re going to spend tonight staring at boxes and talking to your cat, and while Margin seems like good company, she’s not going to tell you where the hardware store is, or which plumber won’t rob you. Come at six. Bring nothing.”
She was out the door before Margot could argue, her rain boots crunching on the gravel drive, her braid swinging.
Margot looked at Margin.
“We’ve been adopted,” she said.
Margin had climbed into an open moving box and was nose-deep in a stack of dish towels, pulling them out one by one and depositing them on the floor. She had already investigated every box in the kitchen that wasn’t fully sealed, and two that were.
* * *
The Heron’s Perch was a converted Craftsman-style house on the bluff above the harbor, repainted a soft slate blue with white trim. A wooden sign shaped like a heron hung from the porch railing. Wind chimes made of sea glass clinked in the breeze. The view from the front steps—if the fog had been cooperative, which it wasn’t—would have shown the entire cove, the jetty, and the open Pacific beyond.
June met her at the door wearing an apron that said ASK THE COOK, but the second line—AND THEN DO WHAT SHE SAYS—was partially obscured by what appeared to be splattered chowder.
“Perfect timing. The bread just came out.”
The kitchen was the heart of the house—a big, warm room with a six-burner stove, open shelving stacked with mismatched bowls, and a farmhouse table long enough for ten. A pot of chowder was simmering on the stove. Fresh bread cooled on a wire rack. The room smelled like butter and dill and salt air, and Margot felt something she hadn’t felt in over a year: appetite. Not just for food, but for the kind of ordinary evening that she’d stopped believing existed.
A woman was sitting at the far end of the table with a cup of tea and a romance novel. She looked up when Margot entered and smiled—bright and warm, the kind of smile that came easily, without calculation.
“Margot, this is Helen Pruitt,” June said. “She’s been staying with me for about a month now. Helen, Margot just bought Agate Cottage.”
“Oh, that sweet little place down by the harbor!” Helen closed her book, marking the page with a receipt. She was in her late sixties, silver-haired, with reading glasses pushed up on her head and the kind of soft, open face that made strangers tell her about their problems in grocery store lines. “I walked past it the other day. It has wonderful bones.”
“That’s what June said.”
“Because June and I have excellent taste.” Helen patted the chair beside her. “Sit down. June makes the best chowder on the coast, and she gets cranky if you don’t finish your bowl.”
“I don’t get cranky,” June called from the stove. “I get concerned.”
Over chowder—which was, in fact, extraordinary—Margot learned that Helen was from Portland, recently widowed, and staying at The Heron’s Perch while she “figured out the next chapter.” She said this with the careful cheerfulness of someone who’d been rehearsing the line.
“My husband passed away eight months ago,” Helen said. “Richard. Forty-one years. The house felt… well. You know.”
Margot did know, although her version of “you know” was more complicated than Helen’s. Helen’s grief was clean—a good man gone, a life disrupted by absence. Margot’s was contaminated. She grieved a man who hadn’t existed.
“So, I came out here for a few weeks,” Helen continued. “June has been wonderful. And the coast is… healing. I’ve been reading, walking, taking photographs. I even joined a watercolor class in Newport.” She paused, and something shifted in her expression—a brightness that hadn’t been there before, like a lamp switching on behind her eyes. “And I’ve been talking to someone. A man.”
June, setting down a breadbasket, glanced at Margot with an expression that was carefully neutral.
“Online?” Margot asked.
“Yes—on one of those apps for people our age. Not Tinder—I’m not insane.” Helen laughed. “It’s called SilverConnect. He’s a maritime engineer. He works on shipping vessels—container ships, mostly. He’s stationed in the North Sea right now, but he’s transferring to a West Coast route in the spring.”
“That sounds nice,” Margot said, because she didn’t know what else to say, and because a small, quiet alarm—one she didn’t fully understand yet—had begun to sound somewhere behind her ribs.
“His name is David,” Helen said, and the way she said it—softly, with the kind of tenderness that should be reserved for someone you’ve actually touched—made the alarm sound a little louder.
After dinner, Margot helped June wash dishes while Helen took her tea into the sunroom. Through the kitchen window, Margot could see her in the soft lamplight, reading something on her phone, her face tilted toward the screen the way you tilt your face toward the sun.
“She seems happy,” Margot said, keeping her voice even.
“She does,” June said. She rinsed a bowl and set it in the rack. “She didn’t eat for the first week she was here. Barely left her room. Whatever this is, it’s brought her back to life.”
There was something in June’s tone—not doubt, not exactly, but the careful neutrality of a woman who had seen enough of life to know that the things that bring you back can sometimes take you further away.
Margot walked home through the fog. The harbor lights were blurred and golden below her. A crab boat was motoring in, its running lights cutting the mist. Somewhere a buoy clanged, steady and indifferent; the way the ocean was indifferent to whatever small dramas were unfolding on its shore.
She thought about Helen’s smile when she said David’s name. She thought about the way Tom used to smile when he talked about his clients—the same protective tenderness, the same warmth.
She thought about how convincing a lie could be when it was the thing you most wanted to hear.
Margin was waiting at the front door, and the evidence of her evening was everywhere: a roll of paper towels unspooled across the kitchen floor, every unlatched cabinet hanging open, and a moth—or what was left of one—on the hallway rug. She chirped at Margot and bolted for the bedroom, where she launched onto the one unpacked pillow and began kneading it with the intensity of someone with a deadline.
“I don’t know anything yet,” Margot told her. “I’m probably projecting.”
Margin stopped kneading, chirped once—short, skeptical—and went back to it.
Margot got into bed. The fog pressed against the window. The house settled around her with the kind of creaks and sighs that old houses make when they’re deciding whether or not to accept you. She lay there for a long time, listening to the house think, and she told herself that not everything was a con, not everyone was Tom, and that Helen’s happiness was none of her business.
She almost believed it.
Margot Slade moved to Agate Reach for a fresh start and anonymity following a grave betrayal that unraveled everything she thought was true about her marriage to her late husband. The Sweetheart Swindle is a cozy mystery set in a sleepy, coastal Oregon town where news travels fast and the people are warm, welcoming, and just Margot’s kind of quirky. Quickly striking up a friendship with June, a B&B owner with a knack for keeping people’s bellies full and their spirits settled, and Helen, a widow who has been staying with June in the hopes of finding the light in life again, and who appears to be smitten with a charming merchant marine officer she met on a dating app for single seniors. Margot cannot help feelings of unease as she learns more about her new friend’s romance – the perfect, heartfelt text messages; declarations of love after only weeks of corresponding; and empty promises of a future that would always be just a little too far away. She recognizes the tactics as what they are: a scam. These tactics were exactly what her late-husband had utilized for twenty-four years while Margot was none the wiser. After Helen suffers a suspicious accident, Margot takes matters into her own hands and, with the help of Deputy James Keller and the FBI, follows the paper trail she learned to recognize in the aftermath of her husband’s betrayal. What follows is a scam bigger than she could have imagined, and one that threatens not only the financial security of innocent, kind people, but possibly their lives should the scammers catch on that they know.
The first book in the Agate Reach Mystery series, The Sweetheart Swindle is destined to become a favorite for cozy-mystery lovers. My mom used to love Hallmark Channel Mystery Movies. In high school and college, I would always pretend not to get interested while they played in the background while I did homework or read a book, but truthfully it was always impossible not to get sucked in. This had the exact same feeling. The mystery was believable and authentic. These days, it seems like there are always new stories coming out about scammers. The worst thing about them is that scammers mostly succeed because they prey on our human quality: our compassion. Margot’s investigation was risky, but not out of the realm of possibility for an ordinary citizen to accomplish. Sometimes I read mystery novels and get protagonists do not feel believable or that they would have been able to accomplish how they solved a particular mystery. I loved how perfectly ordinary Margot was, and that her superpower was not in being physically strong, or fast, or a genius – she just had good common sense. She recognized when something did not add up and followed that instinct through to the end. She also investigated without taking unnecessary or foolish risks. Sometimes books and movies engineer these for suspense, but I found that The Sweetheart Swindle was perfectly thrilling without over-intense action or out-of-character heroics. A good mystery novel should be able to captivate with the mystery itself, not the bells and whistles added for flare – and that’s exactly what makes The Sweetheart Swindle an absolute must read.
Curl up with a blanket, a pet, maybe a snack, and spend an afternoon getting lost in The Sweetheart Swindle – a mystery about overcoming our own inner shame and regret, learning to trust in new friends (and our instincts), and the power of community against nefarious intentions.