Murder in the Old Wood

About this book

Hollis Trant walked his pier for nearly forty years. On the morning of April twenty-second the harbormaster found him at the end of it, and the county called it a fall.

SAM BLACKWOOD spent thirty years in Portland homicide, and frost does not lie. In the sheriff’s photographs it lies clean on three sides of the body. No heel-catch. No drag. Either Trant fell without trying to catch himself, or he never walked out there at all.

He was seventy-one, the unpaid keeper of a decommissioned light in Penhallow Reach, Downeast Maine, and for years he had written to Sam’s grandmother. Inland lies the drowned wood: pines eight hundred years old, standing dead in the black water of a peat bog. A buyer sent him nine letters. On the back of each, in pencil, Trant wrote No. On the day he died, a petition to open the bog went to the county.

The clues are small and plain: a pencil note on a tide chart, a bright new brass pin beside an old benchmark, a man who says he was in Portland till ten.

With her: Ezra, a ghost since 1923, speaking through her opal ring; Moss, Eleanor’s Border Collie, who watches a man’s hands; Rowan and his scanner; and Dennis Calloway, eighty-three, who remembers the old stones across the bog.

THE MYSTERY

Sam works it out herself, one fact to a line, nothing she can’t point to. Then she asks for help, out loud, and sets a meeting for seven in the morning on the same wet planks where Trant died. Ezra’s warning is plain: Do not let him walk you. Sam means to stay at the rail.

And when the case closes, the larger question doesn’t. A letter arrives from a law firm in Edinburgh, with no demands. Someone has already told Sam: Somebody always pays for the inspection. And the ring on her hand pulls west-southwest, toward the place where a ninth node should answer, and nothing does.

A paranormal cozy mystery with fog on the reach, a ghost in the window glass, a dog who works in silence, and an ending that opens the door to the final book.

Murder in the Old Wood continues The Moonhaven Mysteries. Each book solves its own case, while a larger mystery runs through the whole series, best enjoyed in order.

Walk into the old wood with Sam before the ninth node goes silent for good.

The Moonhaven Mysteries, in order:
Death at Moonhaven Light
Murder at Moonhaven Light
Secrets at Saltwick
Murder at Stoneharbor
Murder at Cairn Cove
Murder at Tidefall
Shadows at Greyfell
Death at Harrow Point
Murder in the Old Wood
The Last Light at Moonhaven