White Veil, Dark Heart
(2027)(The fifth book in the Moonshiner Mystery series)
A novel by Sherilyn Decter
The fifth and final Moonshiner Mystery — a historical crime novel set on Montana's Prohibition frontier, 1930.
Moonshiner Delores Bailey has four winters at her still, a wolf who never leaves her side, and a town that has finally stopped pretending not to know what she does up that trail. Then a federal agent comes to Pony Gulch and starts squeezing her neighbours, one threat at a time — and a week later he turns up dead at the mouth of an abandoned mine.
The evidence points at the one-armed stranger Delores hired three weeks ago. Sheriff Sam Browne gives her three days to prove otherwise.
What she finds underneath is not one killer. It's a ledger of ordinary people. Banners going up over Broadway for Heritage Week. A schoolteacher getting letters nobody signed. A Chinese family's laundry that somebody has been watching. And behind all of it, respectable citizens who never have to do the thing themselves.
Delores knows how to run from men like that. She learned it in Philadelphia at thirteen, and she has been running ever since. This time there is nowhere left to go — and, for the first time, something worth staying for.
Readers of the Moonshiner Mysteries will find:
Moonshiner Delores Bailey has four winters at her still, a wolf who never leaves her side, and a town that has finally stopped pretending not to know what she does up that trail. Then a federal agent comes to Pony Gulch and starts squeezing her neighbours, one threat at a time — and a week later he turns up dead at the mouth of an abandoned mine.
The evidence points at the one-armed stranger Delores hired three weeks ago. Sheriff Sam Browne gives her three days to prove otherwise.
What she finds underneath is not one killer. It's a ledger of ordinary people. Banners going up over Broadway for Heritage Week. A schoolteacher getting letters nobody signed. A Chinese family's laundry that somebody has been watching. And behind all of it, respectable citizens who never have to do the thing themselves.
Delores knows how to run from men like that. She learned it in Philadelphia at thirteen, and she has been running ever since. This time there is nowhere left to go — and, for the first time, something worth staying for.
Readers of the Moonshiner Mysteries will find:
- A bootlegger heroine and reluctant amateur sleuth in 1930 Montana
Small-town corruption, blackmail, and nativist organizing on the Prohibition frontier
A close friendship between two women — a moonshiner and an Italian-American schoolteacher
A slow-burn romance running underneath the mystery, no explicit content
Found family, a loyal wolf, and Delores's lifelong imaginary companion, Charlie Chaplin
A series finale that resolves Delores's Philadelphia past and closes every open thread
Contains depictions of racial and religious violence, including Klan organizing, consistent with the historical record of 1930 Montana.
Genre: Cozy Mystery