Ryan Bennett has served five years of a fifteen-year sentence for a murder ten people watched him walk away from.
Everyone in Ashford knows the story. Margaret Ellis ran the flower shop on Hawthorne Street for thirty years, and a young man bought two dozen flowers for his wife of eight days, and ten minutes later Margaret was dead in her own workroom.
Five years later, his wife brings Nathan Cole a photograph nobody knew existed. Margaret is alive in it, four minutes before it happened.
And she isn't alone.
Nathan runs the bookstore on Main Street. He spent twenty years working homicide before a bullet in a parking structure ended it, and he has thirty-one flower shop ledgers in his back room that nobody has opened in five years.
One of them is out of place.
Somebody has been through them. Somebody who knew what was in them, and knew Margaret Ellis had found it, and got to her before she could tell anybody.
Everything else in Ashford is exactly as it appears. The fire that killed a young man in October was accidental. The old finding on a builder who fell from his own unfinished building was accidental. A woman of seventy-four who came down her own porch steps in the dark was accidental.
Four times a county has written that word.
Nobody has ever put them on the same page.
SHADOW IN THE GLASS is the second Ashford Mystery: a small-town whodunit about a bookseller who reads things twice, a newspaperwoman who won't stop asking, and a town of two thousand people where everybody already knows everybody, and not one of them is looking in the right direction.
No graphic violence. No profanity. Just a town, a lie, and the paper that outlived it.
Genre: Mystery
Everyone in Ashford knows the story. Margaret Ellis ran the flower shop on Hawthorne Street for thirty years, and a young man bought two dozen flowers for his wife of eight days, and ten minutes later Margaret was dead in her own workroom.
Five years later, his wife brings Nathan Cole a photograph nobody knew existed. Margaret is alive in it, four minutes before it happened.
And she isn't alone.
Nathan runs the bookstore on Main Street. He spent twenty years working homicide before a bullet in a parking structure ended it, and he has thirty-one flower shop ledgers in his back room that nobody has opened in five years.
One of them is out of place.
Somebody has been through them. Somebody who knew what was in them, and knew Margaret Ellis had found it, and got to her before she could tell anybody.
Everything else in Ashford is exactly as it appears. The fire that killed a young man in October was accidental. The old finding on a builder who fell from his own unfinished building was accidental. A woman of seventy-four who came down her own porch steps in the dark was accidental.
Four times a county has written that word.
Nobody has ever put them on the same page.
SHADOW IN THE GLASS is the second Ashford Mystery: a small-town whodunit about a bookseller who reads things twice, a newspaperwoman who won't stop asking, and a town of two thousand people where everybody already knows everybody, and not one of them is looking in the right direction.
No graphic violence. No profanity. Just a town, a lie, and the paper that outlived it.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Julian Brooks's Shadow in the Glass