A Pinch of Magic

by Emily Heil

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

This charming and cozy paranormal novel full of small-town charm and a delightful cast of characters is perfect for fans of B.K. Borison and Lyla Sage.

Cam Parker likes being invisible. As a cookbook ghostwriter, she lives a quiet, orderly life well behind the scenes. But when a storm smashes into her beloved grandmother’s house, she’ll do anything to pay for the repairs, even taking on a nightmare celebrity client and returning from Brooklyn to her coastal-Virginia hometown of Silver Cove and all its small-town drama. 

Before she can say boo, Cam’s predictable world collapses like an underbaked souffle. For starters, she’s developing inconvenient feelings for carpenter Ian McCabe, who’s equal parts charm and complication. And then there’s the actual ghost Cam accidentally summons from an old cookbook, who apparently needs her help to right a century-old wrong. Cam can barely keep all these plates in the air. But the chaos just might push her to question her cautious approach to life—and finally write her own recipe for happiness.

Release date: October 6, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

Looking back, Cam would decide it had all started with that damned tree. Hundreds of miles away from her quiet, orderly life in Brooklyn, the old cedar toppled, and like a domino that knocks into the next in a long chain, it upended everything. And sometimes she wondered if the tree had been pushed.

But those thoughts would come later.

For now, Cam Parker just had one thing on her mind: rhubarb. That is, she needed some. Pronto. Which was a very inconvenient fact given that it was mid-November and the city was doing that perfect fall thing where there was just a little nip in the air and leaves the color of Honeycrisp apples were drifting down to the sidewalks and everyone had pumpkins and gourds on their stoops. All of which Cam adored, but it meant rhubarb was most definitely not in season. She had been to three stores and every stall at the farmers market already, and the ruby-red stalks were proving elusive.

She sent a quick mental prayer up to the heavens—Cam wasn’t particularly religious, but she always pictured God as a figure who looked like Julia Child, a benign, no-nonsense deity with an apron tied neatly around her waist who might just help you out in a pinch—and swung the door open to Sergio’s. Parsley, the wire-haired dog beside her, let out a little yip, his ears turning up as the bell above the door tinkled.

“Miss Ca-mil-lia!” a voice from behind the counter rang out. “The most beautiful girl in my shop all day!”

Cam blushed at the proprietor’s compliment and at his use of her full name, looking around the cramped aisles to see if she was drawing any attention. Luckily, the only other shopper was an older woman so intently evaluating a head of cabbage that Cam could have screamed “Fire!” and the lady wouldn’t have lifted an eye. To everyone else, she was just Cam, but Sergio had a flair for the dramatic and a habit of shameless flirting, which she usually would have found annoying, but from the white-haired man old enough to be her grandfather, it was charming. And Cam didn’t dare correct him, at least not today, when he could be the key to getting her mitts on what was starting to feel like the most difficult thing in the city to score—harder, she thought, than a table at Carbone.

“What can I get for you today?” Sergio asked, not pausing for her to answer. “I know, I know, mushrooms! I got in the most beautiful chanterelles today. You gotta see them,” he boomed, grabbing a cardboard box containing what looked like a bouquet of yellow blossoms and holding it out to her with all the pride of a new father displaying his firstborn. “These were in the dirt this very morning!”

Cam bent forward and inhaled their woodsy, earthy scent, her mind’s eye instantly conjuring a hearty ragu sauce. Maybe a little thyme, she thought, diced fine, just a quarter teaspoon, to balance the meaty quality of the mushrooms. Tossed with pappardelle, a classic pairing. Would a touch of cream make it too rich? Before she fully fell down a rabbit hole in which she was stirring the mushrooms into Dijon-and-beef stew, she snapped herself back to the task at hand.

Such was the difficulty of being a cookbook writer, she had found. While so many chefs and gourmet cooks rhapsodized—rightly—about using seasonal products, a cookbook writer had to pay more attention to publishers’ deadlines than the temperatures outside. Just a few months ago, Cam had spent a sweaty July surrounded by Christmas cookies and holiday roasts. She had grilled steaks on her tiny balcony in the snow. And on a crisp autumn afternoon this week, she would, with a little luck, be testing out a dish of chicken with rhubarb compote so evocative of spring she half expected to smell daffodils in the air.

“Yes, I’ll take these,” she finally replied, nodding at the mushrooms. “Thank you, Sergio. They’re gorgeous!”

Sergio beamed. Cam knew the way to his heart was to compliment his produce.

“But I need something else, too,” she said, mentally wincing. Sergio wasn’t going to like this. “Some… rhubarb?”

Sergio’s grin faded, and his voice developed an agitated edge. “What, do I look like the Easter Bunny to you? Rhubarb is for April, for strawberries! I get the best rhubarb—so tender, not so tart and tough like the garbage in the supermarket! But for spring!” He was getting worked up. Sergio took his business seriously—produce was his religion, and the very idea of rhubarb in November was blasphemy.

“I know, I know,” Cam said. “I just really need it for one of my dishes. For work. I have a deadline at the end of the week, and I need to test this recipe. I’m going to be in really big trouble if I don’t. I could get fired.”

She was laying it on thick, hoping a convincing damsel-in-distress act would soften up Sergio. And it wasn’t too far from the truth. The chapter was due to the publisher, and Russell, her agent, would probably hit the roof if she was late. Not that she had ever missed a deadline before. But Russell was the kind of guy you didn’t want to test.

“Ahhh. Of course, the cookbook lady needs something impossible,” Sergio said, waggling his eyebrows and leaning in conspiratorially. “Tell me, who is this one for?”

Cam sighed. This was why she hadn’t come to Sergio first thing. His market carried the best vegetables and fruit in all of Brooklyn. And she was pretty sure he had a line to a hydroponic grower upstate who could get her that blasted rhubarb she needed. But Sergio was nosy. And happened to be the biggest gossip in all five boroughs to boot. She looked around again to make sure no one could overhear them. Cabbage lady had moved on to beets, which she was holding up to the light to examine as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“You know I can’t tell you, Sergio,” she said quietly. “I signed a contract, like I told you a hundred times. A nondisclosure agreement. I could get sued if I revealed who I was writing it for. You wanna pay for my lawyer?”

Sergio waved his hand in annoyance. “These fancy chefs with their faces on the cookbooks posing with their whisks and their knives—they’re a bunch of frauds! When it’s my Ca-mil-lia who does all the work!”

“I don’t mind it,” she said reassuringly. “It’s the job of a ghostwriter. And I like it. I wouldn’t want my name out there anyway. Besides, most of the people whose names are on the book give me the general ideas for the recipes. I just fine-tune them and make it so readers can follow the directions and the recipes come out right.”

Cam absentmindedly pulled from her bag the torn notebook page Meredith McAllister had handed her the last time they met. Chicken (thighs, i think—what do you think?) w/ rhubarb sauce of some kind? it read. Maybe w/ orange zest? Meredith was a former restaurant chef turned cookbook author known (thanks to Cam) for recipes that turned out perfectly, every time. Her four books, each of which Cam had ghostwritten, sold well, and her last one had even won a prestigious James Beard award.

The note in Cam’s bag was far different than the kind of detailed ideas and instructions Meredith had given Cam in the beginning. On the last project, the notes had dwindled down to a bare minimum of ingredient ideas peppered with lots of question marks. Not that Cam was complaining—certainly not to Sergio, and definitely not to Russell or to anyone else. Meredith was a dream to work with, the work was steady, and the pay was enough to keep her and Parsley in the modest lifestyle they’d grown accustomed to—enough for the rent on their cozy Brooklyn walk-up, a steady supply of books, the occasional good dinner out, and a trip to Paris every other year. Nice and uncomplicated. Just the way Cam liked it.

Sergio harrumphed. “You’re writing the book for the guy from the Food Network, I just know it! The one with all the fake teeth and the hair like a porcupine. He doesn’t look like a real chef to me. Too skinny!”

Cam suppressed a laugh. She wasn’t, in fact, working on Chaz Blakely’s book. But only because she had turned down the offer to work with him several years ago. He and his so-called brand just weren’t her style—way too much flash. Just thinking of all his inane signature phrases made her want to gag. And even though Chaz wasn’t the white-hot celebrity then, Cam had a sense he was on his way. She made a point never to work with people so famous. They were complication personified in her experience.

“I’m not telling you, Sergio,” she said firmly, hoping to get back to Topic A. “Now, about that rhubarb. I remember something about one of your suppliers doing hydroponics? Could you maybe ask him?”

Now it was Sergio’s turn to survey the shop to make sure no one was listening. He leaned over the counter, his voice a stage whisper. In his business, you were only as good as your sources, and Cam knew he guarded that kind of information like it was a state secret.

“Okay, so one of my guys might have mentioned it,” he said. “Wanted me to buy tomatoes from him in February. Bah—I don’t like hydro-whatever. All water! What is a vegetable without sunshine and dirt?”

“Please, Sergio? Can you just ask him for me?” Cam was keeping her voice down, too, though she wasn’t quite sure why. It felt like the two of them were engaged in an illicit drug deal. Then she used the ace up her sleeve she’d had in reserve all along.

“I could make you some of my minestrone,” she said, studying his face for a reaction. She knew she’d come at the right time—just before lunch, when Sergio was hungry. “I could bring it by when I pick up the rhubarb.”

Her move landed. Sergio rubbed his ample belly, and his eyes rolled back until Cam could only see the whites. “Camillia, you’re killing me. Your minestrone…” He trailed off, and he kissed his fingertips and looked out into the distance dreamily, like he was hearing a favorite song. “It’s better than my Sophia’s, which I would never tell her.”

“Your wife doesn’t have to know,” Cam said, a little suggestively. The rhubarb was almost hers, she knew it, and she was willing to stoop to shamelessness to get it. “I’ll bring it hot, and you can eat it here.”

Sergio’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he considered the deal.

“With the bread from Siriano’s?” he asked, naming a bakery near her apartment where she often bought bread and cannoli with filling so light it felt like they might float away. Sergio was no fool.

“Of course.”

Sergio threw his hands up. “I make the call.”

Cam gave Parsley a thumbs-up as she watched Sergio shuffle into the small office in the back of the shop. Parsley just cocked his head. Sergio emerged a few moments later and gave her a gallant bow.

“The lady will have her rhubarb,” he said. “My guy will deliver it in the morning with the regular orders.”

“You’re the best, Sergio!”

“I know, I know,” he responded with an exaggerated shrug. “I guess I’m a sucker for a beautiful girl. And her beautiful soup.”

She blew him a kiss as the bells chimed her exit. As she and Parsley strolled home, Cam took out her tidy shopping list and made a satisfying slash through the last item and sighed with relief. She would be able to test out the chicken recipe. She would make her deadline. Russell would be delighted. Crisis averted.

Cam’s fork hovered in midair, and she closed her eyes, as if cutting off her sight would intensify her power of taste. She rolled the rhubarb compote around on her tongue, scanning its flavors, noticing how the astringent notes of the vegetable—rhubarb was a vegetable, not a fruit, like most people assume, since it usually ends up in tarts and pies—were balanced with the tiny touch of honey she had added. There wasn’t quite enough sweetness, she decided.

She turned to the Moleskine notebook sitting on the scrubbed, knife-scarred butcher block kitchen counter at her elbow. Under the heading Tasting Notes—Chicken/Rhubarb #1, she wrote Increase to 2T honey in neat script. Cam kept detailed notes as she cooked, noting exact measurements and clocking cooking times with an electric timer, and then again afterward, when she critiqued her work, figuring out whether something needed just a minute or two more time over a hot flame to concentrate the flavors or a different herb or a touch more salt.

Cam kept all the tools of her trade—measuring cups and spoons, pans of varying sizes, French linen hand towels, gleaming copper bowls—in sight on the open shelves that lined her spacious-for-New-York galley kitchen and on the far wall, which was set with pegboard painted blue and had hooks, just like Julia Child’s. A large crock beside the stove held whisks, zesters, and well-worn wooden mixing spoons. Cam prided herself on keeping order; she liked it to look beautiful, too. Golden light poured onto the butcher block from a small brass lamp, and a bunch of dahlias beamed at her from a chipped antique transferware pitcher.

Something else was bothering her about the sauce. She took another bite and considered it again. Something was off… Before she could contemplate any further, her phone buzzed. It took Cam a beat to come out of her reverie, and she blinked a few times at the intrusion before she noticed who was calling.

Avery, the screen announced, and Cam lunged at the device, jabbing the answer button. She would usually let a call go to voicemail when she was working—not that anyone under the age of seventy left voicemails anymore. But a call from her cousin trumped the plate of chicken in front of her.

“Avery!” Cam couldn’t help but keep a note of concern from her voice. Her interactions with her cousin were almost always via text—emoji-laden snippets tapped out while Avery waited for a flight to whatever far-flung city was hosting her latest exhibition or at some god-awful hour of the morning after she had left for her studio to paint. Cam couldn’t imagine keeping that kind of schedule—but then again, she couldn’t imagine being a free-spirited artist, either. Sometimes, Avery would arrange a phone date with Cam ahead of time, knowing her cousin in Brooklyn didn’t welcome unexpected interruptions, even in the form of a conversation with her best friend. But an actual, out-of-the-blue phone call from Avery meant Something. Was. Up.

“Hey, Cam!” Cam could hear street noises in the background. “Sorry, it’s a little loud here.”

“Where are you?”

“Budapest! Wild, right? It’s amazing here—you would love the food. I tried this flaky pastry thing that was absolutely to die for, and I bought you a bottle of paprika that everyone swears is the best in the world.”

“I didn’t even know you were traveling,” Cam said.

“It was a last-minute thing,” Avery said. “An opening came up at this artist’s residency for two months, and they’re paying my rent and my airfare. It could be really good for me. I’ll get to work on this new series, and then there’s the networking—a lot of artists here are showing at the big galleries. And one of them is really hot. He’s Spanish. With this intense kind of jawline, like, he literally has a cleft chin like Henry Cavill. He’s the one who played Superman, right? Anyway, I’m considering an intercontinental love affair.”

Now Cam was officially worried. Avery had a way of falling in love with abandon and then taking the inevitable breakups hard. She had only recently stopped incorporating images of bleeding hearts into her paintings four months after her last relationship ended. What was his name? Kyle? Cam vaguely remembered he was a massage therapist.

“Maybe just focus on your painting?” Cam said, knowing as soon as the words came out of her mouth how lecture-y she sounded. She was only a year older than Avery, and anyway, it wasn’t like Avery wasn’t a hard worker. Cam knew her cousin was always hustling, trying to break through in the notoriously tough art world. But another disastrous relationship in the making seemed like a bad idea to Cam.

“Do you always have to be so practical?” Avery retorted. “Maybe if you focused less on your work, you’d find your very own Superman! Maybe, if for once, you just let your guard down for a hot second—”

“I’m fine,” Cam cut her off but kept her tone light. This clearly wasn’t the time for that discussion. “And anyway, I’ve got Parsley for company. Is everyone all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, everyone’s fine.” Avery paused as a siren wailed in the background. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe not? When was the last time you spoke to Birdie?”

Cam’s mouth went dry, and she lowered herself back onto the wooden stool on which she’d been perched. “Oh, God, is Birdie sick?” Cam could no more imagine their seventy-four-year-old grandmother ill than she could picture her in a ballgown. Birdie Parker wore nothing but blue jeans and had never, as far as Cam knew, so much as come down with a cold. It seemed impossible.

“No, no, nothing like that,” Avery said. “But when did you last talk?”

“She missed our last Sunday-night call,” Cam said. “She left me a voicemail saying she had a meeting with the holiday fair committee or something. You know Birdie.” Their grandmother was on enough committees to fill a C-SPAN lineup. And she ruled most of them like a senior statesman, which she practically was in her little town of Silver Cove, Virginia. “So I guess I last talked to her ten days ago or so? Why?”

“I just got off the phone with her,” Avery said. “She called me last week to see how much the boat was worth.”

Cam was confused, though not about one thing: “the boat” could be nothing other than the twenty-foot sailboat that Birdie’s late husband, Eddie, her grandfather, had built by hand when they first married. Cam remembered it only as a dusty, tarp-covered mass in the barn outside Birdie’s house. But Birdie’s face practically shone when she talked about it, which she did often—how it took Eddie years to build it out on the lawn on sawhorses; Eddie with a beer in hand, painstakingly sanding and slicking the cedar planks with varnish. How they had christened it the Happily Ever After and sailed it out onto the mouth of the Chesapeake every Sunday, when Birdie always packed sandwiches in wax paper and bottles of lemonade in the cooler, until Eddie died of a sudden heart attack. Her grandfather had been only fifty, and Cam was just a little girl of six.

Cam could barely remember Eddie—the only impressions she could call up were a whiff of his spicy aftershave and the way he would bounce her on his knee—but when she thought about the boat, she always thought of him the way Birdie described him. A young man with a tanned face and strong arms. The only man with a comeback to Birdie’s barbs. The love of her life.

“Why would Birdie care how much the boat was worth?” Cam asked. “And why would she ask you?”

“She said it was about insurance, which I believed—at first,” Avery said. “And she asked me because of James.”

The name rang a bell but Cam couldn’t place it. James, James… she searched her memory… Oh right, she recalled. One of Avery’s true loves. Maybe two or three back? He was a fellow artist and into restoring vintage boats, which Avery had thought was the most romantic thing ever until he took a job crewing one around the world and had broken it off. Avery had worked motifs of shipwrecks into her paintings for months afterward.

“Did you call him?”

“Yes, and it was fine!” Avery said, a little defensively. “He married one of the other crew members, and they’re living in Santa Monica. And that was ages ago. I’m so over him. Anyway, I sent him photos I had taken of the boat a few years back, and he told me it wasn’t worth much. Too much dry rot, he said. He said it was a ‘sweet rig’ that we should definitely fix up, but not something collectors were looking for. And when I told Birdie, she seemed… I don’t know, disappointed? Which was odd. I got the feeling she was hoping she had a treasure chest stashed in that little barn. It was weird, Cam. It felt like something was up with her.”

“Do you think Birdie needs money?” Cam asked. Their grandmother had always seemed comfortable. The house she’d lived in since she was a newlywed had long been paid off. She had Social Security and a little pension from her days as a schoolteacher. And she hardly lived in high style—flannels from L.L.Bean and $6 breakfasts at Martina’s Cafe down the street from her house were her only indulgences.

Could Birdie have developed a gambling habit? She did love to play solitaire on the tablet Cam and Avery bought her and taught her how to use. Or maybe she had started buying garbage from QVC like her friend’s grandmother did before they took away her credit cards after her family discovered a guest room crammed full of purses and tacky jewelry? No, thought Cam, Birdie was far too practical.

As Cam was contemplating these implausible scenarios, she heard a babble of voices in the background on Avery’s end.

“Cam, I have to go. Everyone’s headed to this late-night club,” Avery said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Including Mr. Intense Eyes.”

“Go have fun,” Cam said. “I’ll check in with Birdie.”

“Thanks, Cam,” Avery said, her voice suddenly wistful. “You know, sometimes I wish we could just go back to being twelve, before we cared about boys or careers and we were just us, carefree, you and me in our little attic bedroom at Birdie’s.”

Carefree? Cam paused at the word. She had never been carefree. That was Avery, always so confident, so effortlessly beautiful. Avery had looks you’d notice. Even as a young girl, she had been tall for her age, with dark-chestnut hair and fine features, while Cam knew she was medium everything: medium-brown hair, medium height, medium, medium, medium. Cam had never begrudged her cousin her beauty or her ease in the world. If anything, when Avery was around, it made it even easier for Cam to fade into the background, which was more than fine by her.

“Now I really have to go,” Avery said. “Let me know when you’ve talked to Birdie, would you? Feel her out? You know she would never ask us for help.”

“You’re right about that,” Cam said. “Okay, I’ll let you know.”

“Love you, Summer Sis.”

Summer Sisters. That had been Cam and Avery ever since they were little. Inseparable. So close they decided they were more sisters than cousins—at least for a while every year. Avery’s parents would send her to Birdie’s for a month every summer. Cam spent almost all her summers at Birdie’s while her mom was off doing her usual flighty routine. And then, after a car accident killed her mother when Cam was sixteen, she moved in with Birdie full-time.

“Love you, too.”

Cam hung up and immediately called Birdie. She reached her answering machine and began to suspect that her grandmother—usually so eager to chat—was ducking her calls.

“Hi, Birdie! It’s me,” she said after the beep. “Again. Call me as soon as you get the chance. Love you!”

Later that night, as Cam climbed into bed and rubbed her hands with verbena-scented cream to ward away the chef’s curse—dry skin that came with washing her hands a million times a day—Cam considered what Avery had said. Not about Birdie, though the worry about her grandmother sat heavy in her stomach. Cam was struck by what Avery had said about letting her guard down, about working less and finding romance. Her cousin usually left that subject alone, knowing full well Cam would shut her down, fast, just like she always did.

But tonight Cam looked at the empty space alongside her in the quilt-draped bed and wondered if Avery had a point. What would it be like to have someone there beside her? She imagined sweet old Sergio and Sophia. Did they still hold each other at night? She pictured Sophia’s salt-and-pepper hair resting on her husband’s beefy shoulder and Sergio snoring softly. She imagined her beautiful cousin chasing a handsome man across the cobblestoned streets of Budapest under a full moon. Maybe Avery would wake up in his arms tomorrow. Could it all be worth it?

But then Cam thought of the sorrow Birdie carried around for Eddie, who was there one day and torn from her the next. The decades of heartbreak that followed. And of her own mother, who never found love but whose yearning for something more had led her to… Cam pressed her hands to her eyes as if to physically halt the memories. She inhaled the verbena and willed her mind to stop spiraling.

No, Avery was wrong, Cam thought as she scrunched her pillow to just the right shape under her head. She was better off on her own. And besides, she wasn’t entirely alone. “Good night, Parsley,” she said softly to the curled-up figure in his cushy dog bed. Parsley sighed a sleepy whine in response.

And just as Cam was about to drift off, a thought wiggled its way into her consciousness. The orange zest in the rhubarb sauce. It was all wrong. Everyone did orange with rhubarb, she thought. It was too predictable. It needed something else instead… Cam yawned as she sat up, flipping on her bedside light and grabbing the notebook sitting at a neat right angle and a pen from the drawer below.

Cam paused before making the call. She felt like she was being disloyal to Birdie, prying into her grandmother’s life by pumping her dearest friend for information. But what else could Cam do? Birdie still hadn’t called her back, even though she had left two more voicemails, each progressively more urgent.

Cam kept reassuring herself that Birdie was merely trying to avoid her, which was worrisome but certainly better than the alternative. At this point, Cam’s usual rationality had deserted her, and she was envisioning Birdie lying in a heap at the bottom of those steep steps that rose from her grandmother’s living room like a sheer cliff. Just climbing them could feel like a workout. A few years back, Cam had tried to convince Birdie to put nonslip strips on the risers, which had been worn to a soft sheen by a couple hundred years’ worth of feet. But her grandmother was having none of it. “Stickers? On my oak floors?” Birdie had sniffed. “What a silly idea. I’m hardly some feeble old lady!” She seemed equally offended at the prospect of an ugly mar on her beautiful historic home as she was at the suggestion that she might be slowing down.

Cam was so distracted with worry that she had lost track while testing a recipe that morning and used a tablespoon for the kosher salt instead of a teaspoon. That kind of thing never happened to Cam Parker. Which meant it was high time for the phone call. She put on the kettle and ground fresh coffee beans for the French press. A conversation with Marcus Bloodsworth—the barber to everyone in Silver Cove, except those brave enough to sneak off to the Supercuts at the strip mall the next town over—always took a long time.

“Marcus Bloodsworth speeeaahking.” Marcus had a serious Southern accent and a way of drawing out his words as if he was in no rush to go anywhere, so why wouldn’t he give every vowel its moment in the sun? He and Birdie had been best friends for . . .