Off-Season at Waxwing Bench
(2026)(The fifth book in the Off-Season Mystery series)
A Story by Wanda Fellows
Eight hundred people fill Waxwing Bench in October. Ninety are left in January. The Oregon wine hamlet Danny Reyes has chosen for the last stop on her book is pruned down to black knuckles and gravel rows, with fog that sits in the vines till noon and comes back at three, eleven dark tasting rooms, and exactly one lit window — the Bench Room, where Marisol Cobos keeps a wood stove going and a pear galette in the case. It's a town Danny falls for in a day. And on the third Saturday of January, the entire Bench squeezes into a cellar for the Bench Trial, an annual blind tasting where forty years of neighbors score thirteen wines by candlelight and argue about every one. Danny is at that table. So is her camera-toting partner, her best friend in the kitchen, and every last person who lives on the Bench. Two hours later, the man who founded the place is dead in his own barrel aisle.
Nobody left the building. That's the thing that will not come apart. In four other towns, the empty season isolated Danny's suspects one at a time; here it gathered every one of them into a single room and handed all of them the same true, unbreakable account of themselves — including her. Because Danny isn't the friendly outsider this time. Her name is on the detective's list in the same handwriting as everybody else's, which means no interviews, no access, no allies with any standing in Oregon, and a sealed cellar she can't get into. All she has is paper — a chart drum, a stack of photographs, a scoring sheet — and eleven honest people describing a room that quietly dissolved for six minutes while nobody was watching. The final Danny Reyes mystery brings the series home with its warmest cast, its coldest crime, and one question the Bench will never fully agree on: what kind of man they actually lost.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Nobody left the building. That's the thing that will not come apart. In four other towns, the empty season isolated Danny's suspects one at a time; here it gathered every one of them into a single room and handed all of them the same true, unbreakable account of themselves — including her. Because Danny isn't the friendly outsider this time. Her name is on the detective's list in the same handwriting as everybody else's, which means no interviews, no access, no allies with any standing in Oregon, and a sealed cellar she can't get into. All she has is paper — a chart drum, a stack of photographs, a scoring sheet — and eleven honest people describing a room that quietly dissolved for six minutes while nobody was watching. The final Danny Reyes mystery brings the series home with its warmest cast, its coldest crime, and one question the Bench will never fully agree on: what kind of man they actually lost.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Wanda Fellows's Off-Season at Waxwing Bench