Off-Season at Poorwill Springs
(2026)(The third book in the Off-Season Mystery series)
A Story by Wanda Fellows
Sixty-one people live at the end of a nineteen-mile dead-end road in the Mojave, in a spa town the highway forgot. In August it hits a hundred and eleven degrees and stays there. You can't pass through Poorwill Springs — you can only show up, which is exactly what Danny Reyes does, hauling her Airstream past a drained motor-court pool and a row of palms one man keeps alive by hand. The town runs on Pilar's café, a schoolhouse that doubles as the library and the county cooling center, and the stubbornness of people who stayed. Danny spends a fine, sweaty week making friends. Two days after she tapes forty-one minutes of the town's water operator explaining that he is never, ever careless, he's found dead in the heat, out at the pumphouse, and everyone agrees the desert did it.
Everyone is right about that. Nobody's wrong. And still something won't sit — a water jug capped and standing upright on a truck seat, when a man who goes down in that kind of heat does not walk his water back to his truck. There's no investigation to join, because there's no crime to investigate: the coroner is satisfied and the town is grieving and Danny is the only person in the county pulling a thread. What she finds is buried in the flattest paper imaginable — a sign-in sheet, a radio log, a meter book with two pages missing after thirty-one years without a single one torn. This is a small town that has held itself together on kindness and unpaid work for two decades, and Danny is about to learn what it cost, and who paid.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Everyone is right about that. Nobody's wrong. And still something won't sit — a water jug capped and standing upright on a truck seat, when a man who goes down in that kind of heat does not walk his water back to his truck. There's no investigation to join, because there's no crime to investigate: the coroner is satisfied and the town is grieving and Danny is the only person in the county pulling a thread. What she finds is buried in the flattest paper imaginable — a sign-in sheet, a radio log, a meter book with two pages missing after thirty-one years without a single one torn. This is a small town that has held itself together on kindness and unpaid work for two decades, and Danny is about to learn what it cost, and who paid.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Wanda Fellows's Off-Season at Poorwill Springs