Baby Queen

Baby Queen is a Southern crime novel centred on Natalie “Nat” Link, a thirtysomething entrepreneur who has returned to her family’s Alabama honey farm and is trying to turn its declining beekeeping business into a cosmetics company. What Nat does not initially understand is that the respectable family business has always had another side: her formidable grandmother Lana Link spent decades using bee trucks to transport marijuana, maintaining relationships with professional killers and covering up the murder of Nat’s father.

The novel begins with an omen. Nat finds a dead queen bee outside one of the hives. She has recently made a decision Lana fiercely opposed: selling the family’s largely unused horse farm to raise the money needed to develop Black Honey, Nat’s skincare company, whose principal product is a honey-based facial treatment called the Black Mask. Nat performs the old ritual of “telling the bees” about changes in the family, unaware that selling the horse farm has literally uncovered the family’s past.

Elsewhere, the novel introduces Adam Harmony, who outwardly sells used cars at Harmony Motors but is actually a professional contract killer. Adam and his younger brother Boy Harmony inherited the business from their father, John Bell Harmony. Adam treats murder as skilled manual labour governed by rules. Early in the book he lethally injects an elderly man, Bill Lemon, whose own daughter has paid for the murder. Boy, who works as an EMT as well as participating in the family business, arrives conveniently at the crime scene afterward.