Fixed
to Death

Consuelo "Connie" Sadler spent thirty years at Boeing asking machines why they died. Failure analysis, they called it. Take the broken thing apart, measure the wear, find the fault the owner will never admit to. She didn't expect the habit to outlast the paycheck. She certainly didn't expect it to turn up a murder.

Two years widowed, Connie has traded the city for Gault Mills, her late husband's fading mill town in the Pacific Northwest foothills, and hung a shingle over what used to be the family hardware store: Open Ticket Repair, where the whole town carries in whatever has stopped working and mostly carries it home again. She keeps a notebook for every job, a three-legged cat named Bus in the front window, a retired postmistress who sorts mail that isn't hers and reads all the return addresses, and a quiet man at the next bench she's started to notice she notices.

It must sit in the shop window where the whole town can watch Connie make it right.

For the first time in a long while, life keeps ordinary hours. Then Sylvia Odegard, the imperious last daughter of the family that built the town, brings in a 1911 cash register that has "stopped keeping count honestly," with one strange condition. Days later, Sylvia is dead at the bottom of her cellar stairs, and Gault Mills settles on the easy word for it. Accident.

Connie has spent a career reading what broken things reveal about the people who handled them, and too much about Sylvia's death refuses to add up. The county has closed the file, the police chief wants the matter dropped, and Sylvia's estate is already being packed up for sale. Every trace of what really happened is about to scatter to the highest bidder—and she isn't about to let anyone mark this ticket closed until the truth is accounted for.