A Curious Death in Sable Cove

Nora Ashby spent sixteen years making very sure nobody could call her a Sable Cove girl. Then, in one gray fortnight, her job folds, her fiancé leaves, and a lawyer's letter informs her she's inherited Ashby's Oddments: her great-aunt Posy's leaning, three-story curiosity shop on the half-boarded waterfront of the salt-fog town she fled at eighteen. The plan is simple: settle the estate, sell the building, and be gone by the new year.

The plan lasts exactly one night.

A fall on the shop's crooked stairs leaves Nora concussed, and when the room steadies, there's a man leaning in the doorway in a 1920s collar, entirely transparent, and delighted to finally be seen. Meet Augustus "Gus" Thorne: rum-runner, charmer, dead since 1927, and bound to these walls ever since. The fall didn't give Nora anything. It knocked loose a door her mother slammed shut in her childhood: the Ashby women can see the dead, and now, so can she.

By morning there's a second ghost in the shop. Della Voss ran the bakery two doors down. She was found at the foot of her own stairs and tidied into a paragraph: accidental fall. Della knows better. She just can't hold on to the last hour of her life: only a smell of bergamot and the sound of her own name. She begs Nora to find out who, and why, so she can finally rest.

Nora means to refuse. She's leaving. But a dead woman is a hard thing to walk away from, and Gus, thrilled to have a partner after a hundred years of talking to nobody, is impossible to shut up. Together they make a strange, effective pair: Gus drifts through walls and works the town's other dead for what they saw, and Nora launders the results into daylight as a nosy newcomer's hunches and conveniently-overheard gossip. The trouble is Detective Sam Reyes: methodical, recently transferred, already certain Della's case is closed, and entirely uninterested in a returning outsider's "feelings."

Because a ghost's word convicts no one. To get justice for Della, Nora will have to find the proof in the daylight world: a chased-down perfume, a missing ledger, a waterfront full of perfectly nice neighbors who each, it turns out, had reason to want kind, quiet Della Voss to stop asking questions. And the closer Nora gets, the more she has to wonder whether solving this murder is going to cost her a great deal more than the sale of a shop.

Warm, witty, and gently spooky, A Curious Death in Sable Cove is the first of The Sable Cove Mysteries: a paranormal cozy series for readers who like their whodunits low on gore and high on heart, their ghosts funny, and their small towns full of secrets. Perfect for fans of Angie Fox, Alice Kimberly's Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, Tonya Kappes, and anyone who's ever wished the Thursday Murder Club had a medium.

Pour the tea. The dead are talking, and Nora Ashby is finally listening.