Fixed to Death is out today. It is a Kindle ebook, it is the first Repair Café Mystery, and you can buy it here.
A woman paid a great deal of money to have an old cash register repaired where everyone could see it. Sylvia Odegard set a 1911 National in a Main Street window, lit it after dark, and let the town watch the work go on night after night.
Two weeks later she was dead at the foot of her cellar stairs. The county called it a fall and closed the file, and that was supposed to be the end of it.
Connie Sadler finished the register and found that the last thing done to it was not a repair. Someone had forced the case, a key was gone from the estate, and the woman who could have said why was already buried. The county would not reopen the file, and the town wished she would let it drop. She left the register in the window and the ticket open.
This is a fair-play mystery, so everything Connie works out, you were shown first, in plain sight, at the time it happened. If you want to know what that promise costs a writer to keep, I wrote about it back in the craft notes.
Read it. If it keeps you up past when you meant to stop, leave a review. For a first book, a few words from a real reader do more than anything a writer can buy.
Some of you have been walking around Gault Mills since the rain posts in March, before there was any book to point to. That you read a town into being with me is the best part of this whole business.
The register has been in that window the whole time, put there to be looked at. Today the book is set out the same way, where anyone can pick it up and see what the fix came to. Have a look.