Hex's Handcuffs and Hotsauce

In the sultry shadows of New Orleans, where jazz drifts through graveyards and every alley smells like rain, rum, and sin, Cassie Baptiste runs Crossroad Curiosities under a flickering neon sign.
The first business is for tourists: love spells in plastic bags, fake gris-gris charms, and "authentic" hexes sold to drunk honeymooners on Bourbon Street.
The second business is behind a locked red door.
That is where the real magic lives.
Cassie follows Maman Brigitte and Baron Samedi, raised on graveyard offerings, veves in candle wax, and the belief the dead are never gone. When her half-brother is found murdered in an abandoned chapel with ritual marks carved into his skin, Cassie knows it was not an ordinary death.
Something ancient feeds in New Orleans, and it remembers her family.
Her search pulls her to Bastian Devereaux, a controlled private detective hired to investigate occult murders. He believes in evidence, not magick, and sees Cassie as witness and complication.
Cassie is fiery, grieving, and determined to find the truth. She believes magic is real, while Bastian refuses anything that cannot be proven.
Their connection is volatile: heated arguments, reluctant cooperation, and stolen moments in graveyards where tension becomes something neither can ignore.
But the case runs deeper than they realize.
A cult is operating in New Orleans, preparing a ritual tied to an immortal figure from Creole folklore-a former plantation owner who should have died over a century ago. Beautiful, monstrous, and ageless, he built an empire beneath the French Quarter from stolen souls.
And he wants Cassie alive.
Not just for power-but because her blood may be the final key to something buried beneath the city.
Hexs, Handcuffs, and Hotsauce is a dark paranormal romance of Southern Gothic horror, cult conspiracies, forbidden magic, and dangerous chemistry between a believer in magic and a man who refuses to believe.