Author: R. A. Ross

Coming Soon

I am in the process of reviewing and editing at the moment and am planning to have the book ready to publish by the first week in September.

Some places feel different the moment you arrive.
Not because they are larger than life.
Not because they promise adventure.
But because they feel like stepping into another world for a little while.
The Timber Hollows Renaissance Festival had always been like that.
For two weeks every summer, the pine forest trails outside town transformed into something halfway between history, theater, and controlled chaos. Merchants filled the pathways with music and candlelight. Performers wandered the grounds in elaborate costumes. Knights fought for cheering crowds while tavern singers traded jokes and songs late into the evening beneath strings of lanterns hanging through the trees.
People came looking for magic.
Most years, they found it.
Ryan Mooney never expected the festival to change his life.
Again.
After surviving two murder investigations in less than a year, Ryan had hoped for something simpler this summer. Good coffee. Long evenings. Festival food. Time spent with people he cared about.
Especially Cody Barrett.
Cody was staying at Ryan’s Victorian house while helping manage the festival’s temporary internet systems, and somewhere between late-night conversations, shared breakfasts, and preparing for opening weekend, something between them had begun quietly changing.
Ryan just hadn’t fully admitted it yet.
Then opening day arrived.
Along with performers, secrets, old insecurities, and a murder hidden inside a staged act witnessed by hundreds of people.
When a beloved member of the Queen’s Court dies during the festival’s famous Human Chess Match, suspicion spreads quickly through the cast and crew. Rumors spiral. Relationships fracture. And Ryan and Cody once again find themselves pulled into an investigation that reveals how dangerous assumptions can become when people confuse performance with truth.
Because behind every costume is a person.
Behind every role is a secret.
And sometimes the most dangerous lies are the ones people tell themselves.
Welcome back to Timber Hollows.

Available May 25, 2026

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Some towns hide their secrets.
Timber Hollows practically serves them with coffee and pastries.
Nestled deep in the pine forests of East Texas, Timber Hollows is the kind of town where people still wave from passing trucks, local gossip travels faster than the internet, and everyone eventually finds their way to Groovy Grounds Café. Between the smell of fresh espresso, warm cinnamon rolls, and the steady comfort of familiar faces, Groovy Grounds has become the unofficial heart of the community.
For Ryan Mooney, that was always enough.
Good coffee.
Good people.
Quiet mornings.
And maybe a little less drama than life usually insisted on providing.
Unfortunately, life had other plans.
When a local theater production of Hamlet becomes overshadowed by rumors, rivalries, exhaustion, and growing tensions behind the scenes, Timber Hollows suddenly finds itself facing tragedy once again. What begins as an apparent accident quickly unravels into something far more personal, exposing grief, obsession, loneliness, and the dangerous stories people create when they desperately want to feel seen.
As Ryan and Cody Barrett begin untangling the truth, they discover that the theater world isn’t only built on performances staged beneath bright lights. Sometimes the most convincing roles are the ones people perform in everyday life.
And sometimes the hardest thing in the world is letting someone see who you really are.
Filled with cozy coffee shop charm, small-town warmth, found family, slow-burn romance, theatrical chaos, emotional healing, and murder, Alas, Poor Max welcomes you back to Timber Hollows, where the coffee is hot, the gossip travels fast, and even grief becomes a little easier to carry when nobody has to carry it alone.

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Some lives do not fall apart all at once.
They come undone quietly, in the spaces left behind.
A chair across the room that remains empty.
A voice no longer answering from the next room.
A future that once seemed certain, suddenly replaced by silence.
Ryan Mooney understood that kind of silence better than he ever wanted to.
At forty-six, Ryan had already lived through the kind of heartbreak that changed a person. After the death of his husband, Danny, he found himself standing in the wreckage of a life they had built together. One filled with books, quiet jokes, steady love, and plans for a future neither of them would fully reach.
For a long time, surviving each day felt like enough.
But grief, like life, has a way of shifting.
Slowly, Ryan began to understand that moving forward did not mean forgetting. It meant learning how to carry love into whatever came next.
That road led him to Timber Hollows, a small East Texas town surrounded by pine trees, old stories, and more history than some people want examined. There, Ryan built a new life from the pieces he still had left. He bought an old Victorian house on the edge of town. He settled into the daily rhythm of Groovy Grounds, the café he owns but only half-runs, since his capable manager, Jamie Caldwell, refuses to let him reorganize the pastry case based on emotion. He started writing again slowly, reluctantly, and with more false starts than he cares to admit.
He has also found something he had not expected.
Community.
Timber Hollows is the sort of town where everyone knows one another or thinks they do. It is full of morning walking groups, college students, old family grudges, town gossip, and enough overlapping lives to ensure that no secret stays buried forever.
It is also the sort of town where murder is apparently quite impossible… or maybe not.

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The series page for the Timber Hollows Cozy Mystery Series on Amazon in now live!

On May 21 I added the second book for the Timber Hollows Cozy Mystery Series, Alas, Poor Max up to KDP.