Lights Out
(2026)(The third book in the S'more Than Meets the Eye Mystery series)
A Story by Rachel Darrishaw
Late August on Loon Lake, and there's an edge on the fog. Session Nineteen brings the first frost of the year and the Pelletier family, three generations of them, up to celebrate the eightieth birthday of a tiny, sharp matriarch who gets out of cars by herself, thank you very much. She has also announced — cheerfully, at the welcome fire, in front of everybody — that she's finally decided what to do with forty acres of undeveloped lakefront, and she'll be telling them all at the cake on Saturday. "Some of you won't like it." Maddie "Sunny" Byrne has run enough family weeks to know exactly what that sentence does to a dinner table. She rearranges cabins, hands out graham crackers when a room starts going sideways, and moves two guests into the camp's only two heated cabins ahead of the cold front, because that's her job and she's good at it.
By dawn Wednesday one of those cabins is quiet, and a man nobody much liked doesn't come to breakfast. It's the gentlest death imaginable and there's nothing accidental about it. Worse, the cabin assignments were changed at the last minute — in Sunny's own handwriting, on a chalkboard, initialed twice — and when the county looks at the whole thing sideways, the only person they can prove knew who was sleeping where is the woman who moved them. With a formal interview on the calendar and a birthday party she refuses to ruin, Sunny has to work her own camp as a suspect, lean hard on the found family who've never once doubted her, and figure out something colder than the weather: whether the man who died was ever the one who was meant to.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
By dawn Wednesday one of those cabins is quiet, and a man nobody much liked doesn't come to breakfast. It's the gentlest death imaginable and there's nothing accidental about it. Worse, the cabin assignments were changed at the last minute — in Sunny's own handwriting, on a chalkboard, initialed twice — and when the county looks at the whole thing sideways, the only person they can prove knew who was sleeping where is the woman who moved them. With a formal interview on the calendar and a birthday party she refuses to ruin, Sunny has to work her own camp as a suspect, lean hard on the found family who've never once doubted her, and figure out something colder than the weather: whether the man who died was ever the one who was meant to.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Rachel Darrishaw's Lights Out