Publication: 11th November 2025 (paperback), 23rd January 2026 (eBook) – Storm Publishing
When Dakota Green’s best friend asks her to be the maid of honor, she expects champagne toasts and bouquet tosses—not a dead priest in the holly bushes of The Rose Palace estate. But in Aubergine, Virginia, something borrowed and something blue might just include a corpse or two.
A winter getaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains should be wonderland bliss for pre-wedding festivities. Instead, it’s a blizzard of suspicion as the groom’s Texas relatives arrive with secrets as deep as the falling snow.
Just when Dakota thinks she can’t handle one more wedding disaster, the officiating priest takes a fatal plunge from the fourth floor, with a bullet through his heart andDakota’s boyfriend Sheriff Charlie Strong becomes the prime suspect.
With Charlie behind bars and the wedding hours away, Dakota must clear his name while ensuring her best friend gets her perfect day. Between a gun-wielding father of the groom, a scandalous romance and a bride who refuses to postpone, Dakota faces her greatest challenge yet. Can she unmask a killer before the wedding march? Or will this matrimony end in mayhem?
A Bride’s Guide to Happiness and Homicide is the third book in the Dakota Green series. Since I haven’t read the first two books in the series I can say that it can be easily read as a stand-alone. The protagonist, Dakota Green, is a veterinary student who has not only stumbled on a few murders, but she has also been involved in the solutions of the cases.
Dakota lives in New York where she studies in veterinary school, but she is now back in her hometown, Aubergine in Virginia, for the wedding of her best friend Lacy. Weddings can be difficult, but this one is on a whole another level. For starters, the groom’s mother is not exactly thrilled with her son’s choice of a wife and has invited his ex-girlfriend to the wedding. Also, officiating the wedding is a young priest who seems to be in a quite intimate relationship with the groom’s mother. And, while his family is pressuring him to cancel the wedding and return home to Texas to manage the family ranch, it is clear that there is something else going on, especially when the young priest turns up dead.
A Bride’s Guide to Happiness and Homicide was quite an enjoyable, immersive, and quick read (I read it in one evening). The author gives a bit of background about the protagonist’s story in the previous books, from the death of her mother to the discovery of her real father and her newly found stepsister, and while she tries to figure out who is the killer and save her best friend’s wedding, Dakota must also find time to decide about her future, whether to accept the fellowship in San Diego (and keep long distance her relationship with the handsome sheriff) or return home and open her own veterinary surgery.
There is suspense, there is laughter, and there is even a bit of romance and I can’t wait to read more books in the series.
A huge thank you to Storm Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a proof of this novel.
Kristen is a USA Today Bestselling Author, a teacher, and a certified book coach. She has lived coast to coast, but with her extended family in north Alabama, her roots run southern deep. She teaches high school English and writes in local coffee shops near her home outside of Houston. In her free time, she likes to visit parks with her three children, watch quirky films with her husband, and attempt to keep pace with her rescue lab-mix.
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