Whispers Beneath Willowmere
(2026)(The third book in the Willowmere Mysteries series)
A novel by MC Smith
A drained pond. A living woman buried in its mud. A town whose good fortune has always had a price.
Sophie Huang has become the person Willowmere turns to when the impossible needs explaining. Strangers drive hours so she'll hold a dead mother's ring and say whether she was happy. She hasn't learned to say no yet. She hasn't been sleeping much, either.
Then a construction crew drains part of Harker's Pond and finds a stone altar in the basin. Beneath it, a woman. Breathing.
She has no name, no memory, and eyes that change color near water, and she has been under the pond since 1892. The same year Willowmere executed three women, and the year the town's luck turned reliably, unnaturally good.
Sophie's gift should untangle it. But near water her psychometry collapses into a dozen voices at once, and for the first time the answers aren't in the objects. They're in people. Cameron, who hears what Sophie can't. Bea, who pulled a stranger out of the mud and took her home. And a being whose testimony Sophie has no way to verify.
Somewhere behind Willowmere's most respectable doors, someone has kept a schedule for over a century. It's coming due again.
For readers who love a cozy with teeth: found family, old secrets, and a small town exactly as haunted as it deserves.
Book 3 of the Willowmere Mysteries. Reads as a standalone, no cliffhanger, HFN. Closed door, no gore.
Tropes: psychic librarian · water spirit · 1892 cold case · sapphic found family · institutional conspiracy · fair-play mystery
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Sophie Huang has become the person Willowmere turns to when the impossible needs explaining. Strangers drive hours so she'll hold a dead mother's ring and say whether she was happy. She hasn't learned to say no yet. She hasn't been sleeping much, either.
Then a construction crew drains part of Harker's Pond and finds a stone altar in the basin. Beneath it, a woman. Breathing.
She has no name, no memory, and eyes that change color near water, and she has been under the pond since 1892. The same year Willowmere executed three women, and the year the town's luck turned reliably, unnaturally good.
Sophie's gift should untangle it. But near water her psychometry collapses into a dozen voices at once, and for the first time the answers aren't in the objects. They're in people. Cameron, who hears what Sophie can't. Bea, who pulled a stranger out of the mud and took her home. And a being whose testimony Sophie has no way to verify.
Somewhere behind Willowmere's most respectable doors, someone has kept a schedule for over a century. It's coming due again.
For readers who love a cozy with teeth: found family, old secrets, and a small town exactly as haunted as it deserves.
Book 3 of the Willowmere Mysteries. Reads as a standalone, no cliffhanger, HFN. Closed door, no gore.
Tropes: psychic librarian · water spirit · 1892 cold case · sapphic found family · institutional conspiracy · fair-play mystery
Genre: Cozy Mystery