Shadows at Greyfell

About this book

A young man wrote Heard the rock. Going to listen. and walked out into a frozen February field. At dawn the dog found him eighty meters from the barn. The cold had done the work. The cold had not brought him out there.

Greyfell is a town of twelve hundred in the granite hills of inland Maine, far from the salt. Four miles out of town stands a barn Thomas Cray built in 1887 around a twelve-foot face of granite. The locals call it the singing rock.

SAM BLACKWOOD spent thirty years in Portland Homicide before she came home to Moonhaven and her grandmother’s house on Cliff Road. Five of the ten nodes on Eleanor’s list are awake. All winter the ring on Sam’s hand has pulled west-northwest. Then Nell Cray, who has held Stoneharbor for thirty years, goes up to the family barn in Greyfell, and her phone rings through to voicemail.

The Foundation has filed an emergency petition to make the singing rock a federal heritage site, a designation that would lock the trustee off her own land. The formation answers on one dawn a year: February nineteenth. Miss it, and the water under the hill does not turn again until next winter.

THE TEAM

Rowan Ashby, a physician with a second degree in physics, who finds the mark nobody else saw because he had the right light

Moss, Eleanor’s Border Collie, who has barked exactly once in Sam’s hearing. When he barks again, everyone in the barn should listen

Ezra, the lighthouse builder who never quite left, speaking through the ring. He watched the western signal alone for nine days and has no framework for the two hours it turned due north, toward Sam’s front door

Dora Finch, eighty-two, with absolute pitch for stone and a family that has held the door at Saltwick for three hundred years

THE MYSTERY

The sheriff calls it hypothermia: he walked out there himself. But three boundary trees carry marks with the same signature as the marks on the young man’s jacket. His flashlight lies dark with good batteries in it. The scanner shows the rock climbing four hertz at 2:17 in the morning. And a man Sam liked at Stoneharbor stood in the tree line for forty minutes while the sheriff stood over the body.

Sam has one week to learn twelve syllables in a language she doesn’t speak and find out who sent Jacob Finch out to listen, before the same thing happens to the next Finch.

Can a retired homicide detective prove that a death in a frozen field was no accident, while the oldest formation in the network waits for its one dawn of the year?

And when Greyfell goes quiet, Ezra stands at the window watching down the coast. Something there is being held shut. Whoever shut it still wants it shut.

A paranormal cozy mystery with frost on the meadow, coffee on the barn stove, a ghost who keeps his own counsel, and a retired detective who reads a lawyer’s fourteen pages the way she once read a suspect.

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

Spend a frost-bitten week at Greyfell with Sam and learn who still wants it shut.

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