My name is Hana Keller, but my Hungarian grandmother calls me Haniska (pronounced HONNISHKA), an affectionate diminutive I’ve grown used to. I live in a pretty apartment in Riverwood, Illinois, the town where I grew up with my brother Domo, my American father and my Hungarian mother. My grandmother, my mother and I run a place called Maggie’s Tea House; we specialize in European-style high tea. I love working at the tea house, but I also love collecting things, particularly Hungarian porcelain, and I hang around at an antique shop in town called Timeless Treasures, where my friend Falken Trisch has taught me a lot about objet d’art.

Riverwood has an unusually high population of Hungarians, and my family contains two immigrants from what my grandmother sometimes calls “The Old Country.” Recently a group of Hungarian ladies held an event at our tea house sponsored by their parish Magyar group (Magyar means “Hungarian” in Hungarian). Tragically, a woman died at this event, and even more distressing is the fact that she seems to have been murdered—at least that’s what the police who came to the scene are telling us.

Yesterday life was serene. Today, everything has become very complicated for my family. For one, my grandmother, who always made a show of “reading” tea leaves at our events, did a reading for one of the Magyar ladies that didn’t seem to be for show. It gave us all a bad feeling, as did the fact that the teacup of the murdered woman referenced a character from the myths and fairy tales of my childhood, and even my grandmother’s childhood—a terrifying character traditionally seen as something between a witch and an evil old woman. And the more we investigate the situation, the more we are finding that the traditional Hungarian stories are becoming real, and that a capacity for evil does not seem to be limited to the witches, ghosts and fairies of legend.

The “Budapest Butterfly”

For my grandmother, the most troubling thing of all is that the man who has come to investigate is named Wolf. She has always been superstitious about wolves or anything connected to them, and his arrival in our tea house has upset her equilibrium.

I don’t have any problem with Detective Wolf, aside from the fact that his suit is wrinkled and ill-fitting. And that he took away the teacup that held poison, a teacup no one was even supposed to be using because it was part of my décor for the event. It was my personal property, my wonderful treasure of a find, my Anna Weatherley porcelain cup with its butterfly-wing handle and beautiful, hand-painted designs.

The police don’t care about the vessel of death—only that death occurred. And they’ve taken away my lovely Budapest Butterfly.

Now I must wait, with everyone else, to learn how it managed to kill someone.

You can read more about Hanna in Death in a Budapest Butterfly, the first book in the NEW “Hungarian Tea House” cozy mystery series, released July 30, 2019.

Hana Keller serves up European-style cakes and teas in her family-owned tea house, but when a customer keels over from a poisoned cuppa, Hana and her tea-leaf reading grandmother will have to help catch a killer in the first Hungarian Tea House Mystery from Julia Buckley.

Hana Keller and her family run Maggie’s Tea House, an establishment heavily influenced by the family’s Hungarian heritage and specializing in a European-style traditional tea service. But one of the shop’s largest draws is Hana’s eccentric grandmother, Juliana, renowned for her ability to read the future in the leaves at the bottom of customers’ cups. Lately, however, her readings have become alarmingly ominous and seemingly related to old Hungarian legends…

When a guest is poisoned at a tea event, Juliana’s dire predictions appear to have come true. Things are brought to a boil when Hana’s beloved Anna Weatherley butterfly teacup becomes the center of the murder investigation as it carried the poisoned tea. The cup is claimed as evidence by a handsome police detective, and the pretty Tea House is suddenly endangered. Hana and her family must catch the killer to save their business and bring the beautiful Budapest Butterfly back home where it belongs.

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About the author
Julia Buckley is the author of the Undercover Dish mysteries and the Writer’s Apprentice mysteries. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and the Chicago Writer’s Association. She has taught high school English for twenty-nine years.

To learn more about Julia, visit her website at juliabuckley.com.

The author in the late 1980s with her own Hungarian grandmother.

All comments are welcomed.