The Vanishing Act at Crow Falls
(2026)(The sixth book in the Paws in the Pines Mystery series)
A novel by Hailey Hartley
Botanical illustrator Ivy Callum didn't come to Crow Falls looking for trouble — she came for the lichen. Six weeks in a rented cabin, a survey commission from the Wetherton Valley Nature Press, and nothing more complicated than good light, clean air, and her standard poodle Cleo for company. It was a reasonable arrangement, right up until her neighbor extended a dinner invitation, a retired stage magician demonstrated a false-wall illusion for his assembled guests, and by morning someone had found a way to make the trick go very, very wrong.
When the performance room door is found bolted from the inside and the mechanism that should have made the evening memorable has instead made it fatal, Deputy Rask Colvin of the Wetherton County Sheriff's Department arrives to find that this particular gathering of old colleagues carries thirty years of professional grievance beneath its polite surface — and that the illustrator from the next cabin over has already been taking very careful notes. As Ivy works through what each guest knew, when they knew it, and what they stood to lose, the picture that assembles itself is sharp and specific: someone in this cabin understood the mechanism at an engineering level, knew exactly where the evidence would point, and counted on the performance room keeping its secrets. They did not count on Cleo.
The Vanishing Act at Crow Falls is a warm, precise, and thoroughly satisfying cozy mystery — the sixth and final installment in the Paws in the Pines series — set deep in the November pines of a fictional mountain ridge where the cold is honest, the coffee is always on, and a very attentive standard poodle has been working a hallway baseboard since the moment the lights went down.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
When the performance room door is found bolted from the inside and the mechanism that should have made the evening memorable has instead made it fatal, Deputy Rask Colvin of the Wetherton County Sheriff's Department arrives to find that this particular gathering of old colleagues carries thirty years of professional grievance beneath its polite surface — and that the illustrator from the next cabin over has already been taking very careful notes. As Ivy works through what each guest knew, when they knew it, and what they stood to lose, the picture that assembles itself is sharp and specific: someone in this cabin understood the mechanism at an engineering level, knew exactly where the evidence would point, and counted on the performance room keeping its secrets. They did not count on Cleo.
The Vanishing Act at Crow Falls is a warm, precise, and thoroughly satisfying cozy mystery — the sixth and final installment in the Paws in the Pines series — set deep in the November pines of a fictional mountain ridge where the cold is honest, the coffee is always on, and a very attentive standard poodle has been working a hallway baseboard since the moment the lights went down.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
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