And my beloved series' swan song is finally here. The Dubious Commode is the third and last long novella sequel to Ghosts and Tea, and as I've mentioned before, I only had enough sequel ideas for three books, and none of those ideas were hefty enough to justify beefier novels. So long novella sequels they are!
Here be the blurb:
Another wave of suspicious calm follows Freddy and Jonathan's successful solving of the singing skull mystery, which means Fate isn't quite done with the lot of them. Prue carries on with her beloved priory upgrades, stocks up on Felicity's products (arcane and otherwise), and endures the trials of being still of the living world. Freddy and Jonathan are madly in love with each other as ever, their bond growing stronger by the day.
Things appear to go swimmingly for a time, indeed, with Jonathan's workaholic publisher paying Hoary Plimpton a visit for health reasons and Mr. Headley entering the picture with a dragon's hoard of romantic smut for aunt and nephew alike.
But Brody's artistic gift comes under unexpected scrutiny, threatening a horrible shakeup in the priory and a permanent upending of everyone's lives. Then Mr. Headley decides he'd dearly love to be haunted and acquires a few oddities with ghosts attached to them.
Family isn't immune from drama, naturally, as Linford's increasingly panicked letters suggest. Lucinda's trapped in her spiritualist retreat where ladies' pocketbooks are gradually draining their contents, and Antigonous involves his committee in the mystery of the haunted antique commode. It's a haunting that baffles everyone, forcing them to resort to a few foolish and drastic measures to get to the bottom of things—even reconsider old prejudices against the very people who hold the key to ghostly mysteries.
Prue and Freddy's madcap ghostly adventures conclude in this final installment of the Ghosts and Tea series.
The book has its own gallery page over here, in which I share more tidbits about how this epistolary series came about as well as more character inspiration for Felicity Smedley, Jeremy Brody, and Osbourne Headley this time around. I really, really loved writing this series, and I'm glad I gave myself that challenge. It really helped my confidence, and I'm looking forward to using that narrative form again in my future books.
The book is 50K words and is available in e-book format for 99 cents and in print for $9 USD. Those are my standard (and permanent) rates for every book now that I'm fully settled in the long novella camp.
For everyone who stuck with the series since The Ghosts of St. Grimald Priory, thank you so much for your support. I really hope this final book proves itself to be a nice, tidy sendoff to characters who mean a lot to me now. Thank you again, and I hope you enjoy the book.
And a bonus update! I added the 2026 calendar banner to my Book News page, but as with the 2025 banner, there's no date on any of the books highlighted. And that's to allow for changes (especially unexpected ones) in my schedule, energy levels, health, motivation, etc.
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