Bury The Hatchet : : A Day After Valentine’s series (Day After Valentine Series Book 1)

Valentine’s Day is for lovers.
The day after is for the survivors.

In Saint James Black Parish, the only thing sharper than the fashion is the blade in your back.

Kwame Mensah was the Golden Banker of the Apex. Perfect portfolio. Perfect mansion. Perfect wife.
Until he was found dead in a secret apartment in the Basin, his hands severed, a silver hatchet left beside his body like a signature.

For the police, the case is simple. The wife did it.

Chloe Mensah is the perfect scapegoat: a woman who married up from nothing and now stands to inherit everything. But the murder is more than a crime. The hatchet is a brutal echo of the Woodshed Homicide of 1998, a childhood trauma Chloe survived and never escaped.

To uncover the truth, three lives collide in a city built on secrets:

The Accused. Chloe, forced to confront whether she’s being framed or if violence has finally claimed its inheritance.
The Attorney. Sonya Sterling, Apex royalty defending her best friend while hiding the role she unknowingly played in the crime.
The Wolf. Kai Sato, an exiled Syndicate heir who knows that in Saint James, the truth is always buried in bloodlines.

As power shifts and narratives are bought, the question isn’t just who killed Kwame Mensah.

It’s whether justice can survive in a city where silence is currency, trauma is legacy, and monsters aren’t born—they’re made.

BURY THE HATCHET is a gothic noir murder mystery about the sins of the fathers, the rage of the daughters, and what it costs to break the cycle.