Death at Moonhaven Light

About this book

The lawyer said her grandmother died peacefully in her sleep. The bed upstairs was made, and nobody had died in it.

A paranormal cozy mystery with a retired detective, a ghost who has opinions, and a dog who has standards.

Sam Blackwood spent thirty years in homicide and the same thirty years not speaking to her grandmother. Then a lawyer calls at three in the morning: Eleanor is dead at ninety-two, natural causes, the certificate already signed, the estate papers ready for a courier, and Sam is the sole beneficiary.

People don't move that fast for natural causes.

Sam drives north to Moonhaven, Maine, with a manuscript stuck on page twelve, three Boston ferns buckled into the passenger seat, and a water-soaked letter in Eleanor's hand on the console. The lighthouse is dangerous. Old blood debts were never paid. Some families in this town remember.

Moonhaven performs haunted for the tourists, all ghost walks and crystal balls. Sam knows what a town looks like when the people who keep the records are the same people the records would hang.

Eleanor's silver-muzzled Border Collie is waiting at the house, and he looks at her as if she is simply, unforgivably late. Behind the only painting in the house is a hidden chest: a map of a chamber under the lighthouse, sealed in 1923, and a letter with one clear instruction. About the Ellisons: don't.

Then the dog sits down, offers his paw to the empty air, and the temperature drops.

Captain Ezra Moonhaven built the lighthouse in 1873 and fell from it in November 1923. The coroner called it an accident. Ezra has had a hundred years to disagree.

The town's own ledgers show a century of convenient fires, drownings, and forced sales on the northern cliff. The carpenter who tried to prove it is sitting in a cell on a trespassing charge. The very polite lawyer keeps raising his offer for Eleanor's land. And the sharp-tongued neighbor who supposedly hasn't spoken to Eleanor since 1985 turns out to be holding the other half of a three-hundred-year-old book.

A baker who notices everything, a carpenter with ten years of evidence, a neighbor with a grudge and a grimoire, a ghost, and a dog: on the night of the new moon, Sam sets a trap in the lighthouse foundation. But some debts in Moonhaven go back much further than 1923, and the truth about Eleanor's last night is not the story the town was told.

Eleanor left Sam a house, a dog, a ghost, and a question. Thirty years in homicide taught Sam exactly what to do with a question.

Death at Moonhaven Light opens The Moonhaven Mysteries. Each book solves its own case, while a larger mystery runs through the whole series, best enjoyed in order.

Come up Cliff Road with Sam and open the case Eleanor left behind.

Book 1: Death at Moonhaven Light
Book 2: Murder at Moonhaven Light
Book 3: Secrets at Saltwick
Book 4: Murder at Stoneharbor
Book 5: Murder at Cairn Cove
Book 6: Murder at Tidefall
Book 7: Shadows at Greyfell
Book 8: Death at Harrow Point
Book 9: Murder in the Old Wood
Book 10: The Last Light at Moonhaven