JL Collins Publishing LLC
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Some locks are built to punish their own.
Owen Ledbetter spent thirty-four years behind a county counter and never knew his surname was a key. He died on a Friday afternoon in a freezing basement with his fingers locked so hard they had to be worked open—and the record will be true in every particular and wrong about the only thing that matters.
Harriet Godwin is the one person in three counties who can read that sentence. She is also forty-one days into a job she never applied for, sitting on a list of a hundred and nine ordinary people she was supposed to be protecting and never bothered to read.
One of them is already dead.
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About the Book
Harriet Godwin has been the Keeper of Crestwick for forty-one days. Nobody handed her a title, a key, or a single useful instruction—only a dead man's records and a growing suspicion that the job is mostly made of things she is already too late for.
Then the first snow comes, and with it a woman from two towns over who thinks Harriet is a liability. That same afternoon, in a freezing county basement, a retired clerk named Owen Ledbetter is found dead with both hands locked around a ledger.
Everyone else sees a seizure in a cold room. Harriet tastes copper and knows better. Stitched into that ledger's spine is an iron ring made in 1878—a lock that cannot be forced, read, or cut by the wrong hands, and that punishes the nearest member of the family who built it.
It is still armed. It is now in a sheriff's evidence room. And on Friday, a deputy is going to open it.
A fair-play cozy mystery with practical old magic, a slow-burn romance, and a cat who has never once been wrong.
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