Filed Under Murder

About this book

Her grandmother kept forty-one years of other people's secrets in a shoebox. She was also three months behind on the mortgage of the house they were kept in.

Ivy Bloom came home to Clover Lake, Vermont with four boxes, a cat, and a law career she does not discuss. The Lovebird Agency runs on four hundred and seven index cards, alphabetised by first name, in a shoe box on a desk.

Then a developer dies at the agency's own spring mixer. Forty yards from the pavilion, alone on the gazebo steps, with an auto-injector in his hand that did not work.

Ivy is not a detective, and everybody in town keeps telling her so.

She is a woman with a legal pad who knows how to read a document. For six weeks she asks the wrong people the wrong questions in a town of three thousand where every one of them will still be her neighbour on Monday. She destroys the only police canvass this case will ever get. She costs somebody's daughter her privacy at the counter of a diner on a Sunday. She sits in a school gymnasium while forty-one people put their hands up.

The answer is in a town clerk's cash book, and it costs twenty cents to find.

🔍 What you are gettingA fair-play puzzle. Every clue is on the page before the reveal. You can beat her to it.A town you could find your way around in the dark. Vermont, and it is not scenery.Warm, dry and closed-door. No gore. No spice. A cat with opinions.⚠️ What you are not gettingThe cat solves nothing.The romance amounts to two people agreeing to walk a dog.Nobody is triumphant, and the murderer is the kindest person in the book.

If you want a puzzle that clicks shut, this one closes softly. If you want a small town that feels like somewhere you have actually been, it is here, waiting, three months behind on the mortgage.

Ivy Bloom Mysteries, Book One.