Registered for Murder

About this book

Franny Loomis was married in this town in 1991, in the church, in front of everybody. When her husband died nineteen years later she was not his widow, because there was no record of the marriage at all.

For fifteen years Clover Lake has told her, kindly, that she should have filed her own licence. Clover Lake has it backwards.

Verna Beaudry has done the flowers, the hall and the seating for every wedding here since 1988, and she writes it all down. Thirty-eight years of who paid late, who cried, and who cannot be seated within four tables of whom. Going back through her own book for a seating precedent, she finds a wedding the town remembers one way and her handwriting remembers another.

She tells one person she is going to put it right.

A week later Verna is found in a hired refrigerated trailer behind the church hall, and the rental agreement has the name of Ivy Bloom's closest friend on it.

Ivy is not a detective. She is the woman who wrote down the wrong word.

She is a matchmaker with a legal pad who knows how to read a document, and in the week before it happens she watches somebody put a blanket over a vent on that trailer, in daylight, in front of witnesses. There were two vents. Nobody asks which one, least of all her, and by the time she finds out she has asked the wrong question of the wrong person in a town of three thousand where every one of them will still be her neighbour on Monday.

What you are getting
A fair-play puzzle. Every clue is on the page before the reveal, including the one you will read straight past.
Two institutions that each hold half a truth and have never once compared notes.
Warm, dry and closed-door. No gore. No spice. One body, and she was a person for six chapters first.

What you are not getting
The cat solves nothing.
The romance amounts to very little, again.
Nobody in this book is cruel, and the murderer is the most trusted man in town.

The church wrote that marriage down. The town never heard of it. The answer has been sitting in a vestry cupboard since 1991, in a hand nobody has read, in a building this town walks past every week.

Open the vestry cupboard with Ivy and read the hand nobody has read.

Ivy Bloom Mysteries, Book Two. It reads perfectly well on its own.