Hey there! 🙂

Guess what? Kindle Vella is this awesome platform where authors get to serialize their novels, and Amy Willard is totally rocking it with her mystery novel, “JUST A HOUSECLEANER.” Picture this: Patsy, the housecleaner, caught up in this intense crime drama, and it’s a wild ride!

If you’re in the USA (Kindle Vella is exclusive there for now), you can dive into Amy’s book on the platform. And get this – the first three episodes won’t cost you a dime! It’s like a little teaser into Patsy’s investigative world.

Don’t wait, start reading now! The last episode dropped on 8/28/2023, so the whole book is ready for you.

Now, Patsy is not your usual cozy detective; she’s got some extra spice. Picture her racing against time, trying to figure out why everyone’s breaking into Ronnie’s house. It’s just her, facing fears, protecting her friend’s estate – talk about a rollercoaster!

And here’s the cherry on top – the print version and the ebook hit the shelves in April!

How cool is that?

Find out all about author Amy here.

And here’s the first chapter to get you started!

Chapter 1: Patsy Taylor

Patsy Taylor eased open the front door hollering, “Helloooo!? It’s Patsy…Ronnie? Anybody home?”

The resident cocker spaniel’s barks echoed from the furthest reaches of the three-story Victorian home, then grew louder as the mutt approached the front door. Patsy could never pinpoint the direction Ronnie’s dog was coming from, but she always heard her coming.

As if in answer to the barking, a woman’s gravelly voice called after the dog, “Patches! Patches! Stop that barking! Patches!”

This happened every single time Patsy came to clean. Despite knowing Veronica “Ronnie” Spellman for years, even before she acquired “Patches the Purebred”—as her official paperwork read—the dog incessantly barked Patsy’s arrival, and anyone else who came to the door. Ronnie couldn’t seem to train it out of Patches no matter what she did.

“GAAAAWWWD! I’m so sorry Patsy!” Ronnie apologized profusely—again. “I just don’t know what I can do about her barking!” she lamented.

“How many times do I have to tell you, it’s ok! She is what she is…a barker.” Patsy smiled and gave Ronnie a gentle hug, then kneeled down to reassure Patches that she was not a bad guy—again. The dog licked her hands and face, while her tail went wild, in greeting.

“How’re you feeling Ronnie?” Patsy asked her friend. “Treatments going ok?”

Veronica had been diagnosed with cancer a few months earlier and was in the last stages of her chemo treatments, and they were wearing her down. She’d lost a fair bit of weight that she didn’t need to lose, and most of her hair, but, in Patsy’s mind, Ronnie’s can-do personality was the biggest loss.

Veronica had always been a glass-half-full kind of person. Her cheerful demeanor was a magnet when they were working as 911 operators together, especially if the day’s calls had been grim or overwhelming. Her pep talks got a lot of people through the occasional rough shift. Unfortunately when the city completed a huge upgrade to the call center, Patsy and Ronnie stopped working together. Patsy had been recently married and was pregnant—her doctor strongly suggested that the stress of the job was causing problems with her pregnancy—so she’d quit and moved on. Ronnie was promoted and stayed on the job. And it was there that she met and married a police officer who was killed instantly in the line of duty in a freak car accident only a few years after their wedding. Ronnie stayed employed with the call center even after she lost her husband, and she and Patsy stayed in touch off and on for a few years, but eventually contact dissipated.

Patsy had moved around, gotten divorced, raised her daughter, and sent her off to college. She’d worked a variety of service jobs after her daughter was born, and settled on self-employment work doing housecleaning because she just had an entrepreneurial itch that needed scratching. It worked out well for her because she was a wizard at cleaning, and reliable, kind, and fair-priced.

When Veronica became ill it wasn’t too long before she realized that she would no longer be able to keep up with her huge house, the cure being just as bad as the illness, so, she’d asked friends for recommendations for cleaners. Patsy’s name came up and, wondering if this person was the one and the same Patsy, she called.

Both women were delighted to reunite, and Patsy’s half-hour estimate of cleaning time often turned into two-hour catch up over coffee.

This morning, however, Patsy felt the tears threaten as she watched her old friend feebly chase her very spunky cocker to the front door and try to make her quit barking. There was just no umph behind the admonishments—or maybe the dog was just ignoring her as usual. Ronnie’s skin had a gray quality to it, and the weight loss was visible on her bony-looking hands. She sported a turban to cover her sparse-haired and patchy scalp. Patsy wondered if she had woken Ronnie up because she looked thrown together, which was absolutely not her style.