Off-Season at Kestrel Pass
(2026)(The second book in the Off-Season Mystery series)
A Story by Wanda Fellows
In July, a ski town is the emptiest place in California. The chairs are off the cables, the runs are bare and brown, it's ninety degrees at seven thousand feet, and about four hundred people rattle around a village built for two thousand. Danny Reyes tows her Airstream up the old pass road to write about a winter town in high summer, and finds a place she likes immediately: Roz Kinney's general store with the cardamom cinnamon rolls, a valley full of people who've wintered together for twenty years, and the kind of quiet that makes strangers talkative. Then the last of the snow melts out of a north-facing chute — and gives back a young woman everyone in town has spent five months believing moved to Tahoe.
They weren't lying. That's the trouble. Forty people were honestly, comfortably, unanimously wrong, and Danny has never seen anything harder to argue with than a whole town agreeing. The county works fast and lands on the easy man — a boyfriend with no alibi and no gift for defending himself — and Danny won't watch the simplest story become the true one. What she has instead of a badge is a knack for the boring records nobody thinks to pull: a fuel ledger, a work card with one signature where there should be two, a search map with a single blank square. What she doesn't expect is how much she'll come to care about the victim's sister, or how much harder it is to see clearly when you've started to like everyone in the room.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
They weren't lying. That's the trouble. Forty people were honestly, comfortably, unanimously wrong, and Danny has never seen anything harder to argue with than a whole town agreeing. The county works fast and lands on the easy man — a boyfriend with no alibi and no gift for defending himself — and Danny won't watch the simplest story become the true one. What she has instead of a badge is a knack for the boring records nobody thinks to pull: a fuel ledger, a work card with one signature where there should be two, a search map with a single blank square. What she doesn't expect is how much she'll come to care about the victim's sister, or how much harder it is to see clearly when you've started to like everyone in the room.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Wanda Fellows's Off-Season at Kestrel Pass