Bryn ap Math has survived battlefields, sieges, and a thousand years of history. These days, he’d rather survive Monday.

Once, Bryn was one of the Returned, a dead soldier dragged back by a mythic cauldron and used as a weapon. Now he works as a civilian deaths investigator in Cardiff, where his routines are quiet, his paperwork is done on time, and his foster cats are usually the worst part of his morning.

He relies on carefully rationed blood concentrate to keep his mind sharp and his humanity intact. Without it, his thoughts fragment, speech falters, and the old obedience takes over.

Then florist Mabli Rees is found dead in her cold room, pale, bloodless, and arranged among the flowers.

To the police, the scene is baffling. To Bryn, it’s staged. Someone has turned a tidy little shop into a lie, and the clues lead through sedated tea, missing tubing, charity invoices, and the kind of respectable community no one likes to question.

When forthright intern Lowri Evans, who asks all the questions everyone else avoids, is foisted on him, Bryn follows the clues through Cardiff’s committee rooms, church halls, and rainy streets. But the killer knows his routines. Worse, they know how easily the city’s old unease can be turned against him.

If Bryn can’t uncover the truth in time, one more lie may unmask him as the monster he is not but that everyone is waiting to see.

Warm, witty, and quietly macabre, The Bloodless Florist is a Cardiff cosy fantasy murder mystery about paperwork, old magic, foster cats, and the stubborn work of staying human.