Brewer's Luck

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She opened a brewery across the square from his. Then his yeast went missing. Casey Maddox has spent every dollar she has turning an old hop barn in a Bavarian market town into a brewery. The town has drunk one beer for four hundred years, from the Brauerei Brandl across the square, and it has no intention of drinking hers. It doesn't help that her grandfather was the apprentice who walked out of the Brandl doorway in 1956 and never came back. Hannes Brandl has a leaking roof, a loan from 1998, an uncle who wants to sell, and a man from a brewing conglomerate who wants to buy. The one thing he's sure of is his Festbier. Then the town decides the autumn fest beer by blind tasting, and his beer turns sour in the tank. Casey wins the tent. Two days later the Brandl master yeast disappears from the tower, and a DNA test says the yeast in Casey's steel case is the same strain. The whole town knows what that means. She stole it. Or her grandfather did. Four hundred and twelve boxes in the Brandl archive hold the truth about 1956. A brass band needs a tuba. And a cow with a flowering crown on her horns keeps trying to walk up the wrong path. Brewer's Luck is a rivals-to-lovers romance with a real mystery. It has a brass band, a tailor who has fitted every Brandl since 1972, a very old man with a euphonium, and a festival tent where three thousand people sing the last song standing on the benches. For readers who want: • Rivals across a market square who have to trust each other • A mystery solved with a microscope and a stores ledger • Bavaria in festival season: Lederhosen, dirndls, the cows coming down from the mountain • A grandfather's name to clear, seventy years late • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. No violence on the page.