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Hi reader,
No new Jessie book this week, so let me tell you about the trick at the center of the last one, because it is the thing I am proudest of and almost nobody notices it on the first read.
Feathers and Phantoms has been out ten days. A house on Harrow Hill opens after thirty-five years shut, the last of the Merricks comes home to sell it, and he dies at the foot of the tower stair where a governess died a lifetime before him. The town says ghost. Dr. Ambrose Fell, retired, beloved, the most reasonable man in three parishes, says rotten step and enough of this nonsense.
Most mysteries hide the killer behind a lie. This one hides him behind the truth, or rather behind a very sensible version of it, which is far harder to see past. Here is the moment Winifred catches it:
"He was working too hard. That was the thing. Grief and a rotten step do not need a retired doctor to spend a whole day and an evening on the green making certain the town believes in them; an accident argues for itself; an accident needs no advocate. You do not campaign for a thing that is simply true. You campaign against a truth."
That is the whole case in four sentences, and it is on the page well before the ending, which is what fair play means. The clue is not a hidden object. It is a man being slightly too helpful.
A paranormal cozy. Sweet, closed door, violence off the page. It is Book 3 of the Winifred Baxter Mysteries, after Caws and Effect and A Murder of Crows, and it works perfectly well as a first meeting.
If you want something with more teeth this week. Bonneville Shadows came out August 7 and is the opposite kind of book: a geologist dead out on the salt flats, a case closed in nine days and filed as an accident, and a machine buried under the Bonneville that can reach into a room full of people and edit what they remember. Reads as a standalone. For anyone who finished Blake Crouch and went looking for the next one.
Want to start a Jessie book right now, for nothing? The whole first chapter of The Echo Man is up on the site, free, no download and no waiting on an email. It opens the Vale and Ward Files: a woman murdered in an abandoned opera house, staged to match a killer who stopped in 1999, and a detective who has never forgotten a single case in twenty-two years. Read Chapter One free.
The ask. Reviews in the first few weeks are what decide whether a cozy finds its readers or quietly disappears. If Feathers and Phantoms landed for you, two minutes and whatever you actually thought would help enormously.
And if you would rather read Jessie early and free from here on, join Read It First and tick the Jessie Clark box: an advance copy about three weeks before release, in exchange for one honest review. Join Read It First.
Worth a listen. The house podcast, Story Worlds, lives on YouTube, and it opens with an episode called "Every Book Is a Doorway." If you like the way a cozy and a thriller can come from the same hand without either one going soft, it is the conversation for you. Watch it here, or subscribe to the channel and the next one will find you.
If you missed the last two Jessie letters, the one about the iron key that would not stay in the bowl is the closest thing to a companion piece to this one, and the countdown letter from earlier this month has the run-up to all three August books.
One question, and I would genuinely like an answer. In a mystery, do you want to be able to solve it, or do you want to be beaten fairly and not see it coming? I have opinions. Hit reply and tell me yours.
Happy reading,
Jessie Clark
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