Peggy Halloran
Peggy Halloran
Dorrie Kane moves to Elm Grove to reopen her late aunt's bindery and is three days in when the village librarian is found dead under a collapsed bookcase with a 1978 edition of a local history tucked under his arm. The police call it an accident. Dorrie has repaired a thousand spines and knows exactly how a shelf fails when it has been helped. With two apprentices - a teenage ghost-story blogger and a retired postmistress with better intelligence than the constabulary - Dorrie follows the damaged book through the reading-room committee, every one of whom subscribed to that edition and every one of whom has a reason the old mill-pond deed should stay quiet. Between rebinding commissions and the village fête, Dorrie finds four razored pages hidden inside a hollowed spine on her own shelf - and a murderer who cannot bear to hear them read aloud. First in a warm, craft-loving cozy mystery series set in a village where nothing is ever quite repaired.