Fixed to Death comes out one week from today, on Tuesday, August 4. This is the last of these countdown notes before it does.
The book, one more time
The book opens on a repair the whole town could watch. Sylvia Odegard paid far more than the work was worth to have a 1911 National cash register mended in a shop window on Main Street, and she had it lit at night so that no one in Gault Mills could miss it.
Two weeks after she ordered the work she was dead at the bottom of her cellar stairs, and the county called it a fall and closed the file before the funeral. Connie finished the register, because a paid job gets finished, and what she found on it was not age and not use.
Someone had forced the case with the wrong tool, a key was gone from the estate, and the person who could have explained any of it was already in the ground. The town decided the woman from away was making a murder out of a neighbor's accident, and it began taking its broken things elsewhere. She left the register in the window and kept the ticket open.
What kind of book
It is a fair-play mystery, which means every piece of evidence the detective uses is put in front of you first, at the moment it counts. It is a small-town book before it is a crime book, with the body treated decently and nothing on the page you would need to look away from.
Next Tuesday
If you have pre-ordered, there is nothing for you to do next Tuesday. The book will arrive on your Kindle on its own, first thing on release day. If you have not, the pre-order is open until then, and it does the same job.
There is also a newsletter, The Shop's Bell, for anyone who would rather get the launch note in their inbox than watch this space.
I have been building this town on my own for more than a year. Next Tuesday it stops being mine alone.