Murder at the Founders' Festival

Sable Cove keeps its secrets the way the fog keeps the harbor. Politely, and all the way down.

Nora Ashby came back to the faded coastal town she swore she'd left for good, meaning only to sell her great-aunt's leaning curiosity shop and disappear again. A year later the FOR SALE sign is gone, Ashby's Oddments is open most days, and the town that called her the prodigal outsider has started, grudgingly, to leave food on her step. She is almost settled. She is still pretending the small matter of seeing and talking to the dead is a hobby rather than the load-bearing wall of her life. And she still has Augustus "Gus" Thorne, the charming, insufferable rum-runner ghost who has haunted her building since Prohibition and treats her life as primetime entertainment.

Then the bunting goes up. The Founders' Festival is Sable Cove's one weekend of forced cheer, and this hundredth year the Heritage Trust has brought in a guest: Greer Holloway, a brisk, fearless genealogist hired to verify the founding families' bloodlines for the centennial display. Greer does not flatter people. She reads old registers for a living, and she will tell you that families always lie about where they came from, and that the lie tells you exactly what they were afraid of. Nora likes her on sight. That should have been the warning.

By the second night of the festival, Greer is dead at the foot of the old meeting-hall steps, her research scattered, the word from the Trust already settling into place: a fall, a sad accident, nothing to dwell on. By morning Greer is standing in Ashby's Oddments, entirely unbothered to be dead and entirely certain she was not. She remembers an argument. She remembers a name in an old record that had no business being there. She remembers a hand on her back in the dark. What she cannot give Nora is a face. And she does not want avenging, or comforting, or grieving over. She wants her work finished, and she has found the one living person who has no choice but to listen.

So Nora and Gus go to work the only way they can: Gus drifting the festival and the waterfront for what the town's other dead saw, Nora laundering the results into daylight as a newcomer's nosiness, under the cool, skeptical eye of Detective Sam Reyes, who cannot explain her, cannot rule her out, and cannot quite stop looking forward to being near her. Greer's notes lead them straight into the founding families themselves, into a celebrated old marriage that the records refuse to support, and into a flattering hundred-year-old story that someone alive today would do a great deal to keep on the wall.

Somebody in Sable Cove needed kind, brilliant, inconvenient Greer Holloway to stop talking. Nora is the only one who can hear what she has to say. And in a town this small, the truth has a way of coming for the person who insists on it.

Warm, witty, and gently spooky, with a slow-burn romance and a ghostly double act at its heart, Murder at the Founders' Festival is the second Sable Cove Mystery. Perfect for readers of Angie Fox, Alice Kimberly, and Tonya Kappes.