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Hi reader,

Monday is for Jessie, and this Monday has a body in it.

Tomorrow, June 30, A Murder of Crows goes live: the second Winifred Baxter mystery, and the most suspicious cozy you will read this spring.

The setup

When Pelican Cove’s town historian dies at the foot of a dark stair the week of the spring festival, the whole town calls it the old Wexford omen: when the crows sit the roof, the house gives up a soul. Winifred Baxter calls it a button torn off in a struggle, a photograph stolen from its pin, and a forty-year-old secret that has been waiting at the bottom of the cold harbor.

Her crow, Copernicus, has never once been wrong. He will not go near one warm, beloved door in town. And the kindest woman in Pelican Cove keeps telling everyone the death was fate, which is exactly what a murderer would want them to believe.

The opening pages

“The first thing I did every morning was count the things Copernicus had moved overnight, and on the second Tuesday in April the count came out wrong before I had even finished my tea.

It was not a ritual I had chosen. It had developed the way most things in my life had developed, gradually and then all at once, until it was simply the shape of how mornings worked. I would come down the back stairs in the half-dark, unlock the shop, start the kettle, and then walk a slow circuit of the shelves noting what had been rearranged, relocated, or in three memorable cases removed entirely.

Everything had a shelf. I knew every shelf. It was the knowing, my whole life, that I had never been able to stop, and a shop is a forgiving place to put a mind like that, because a shop will hold still and let itself be known.”

Why this one is worth your evening

It is a fair-play whodunit. Every clue is on the page, and you can solve it alongside Winifred if you are paying attention. Sweet, closed-door, off-page violence. And one thread of magic that never quite resolves: the crow knows things, and by the end of the book, Winifred has stopped being able to explain him away. So have I.

Out tomorrow: https://www.jlcollinspublishing.com/books

New to Jessie Clark? If you would rather start with the sharp-edged stuff before the cozies, the Silent Code International thrillers are your lane, and Silent Echo (Book Three) joins them on July 10.

Read the next one first. My Jessie ARC team gets every release early, free, for an honest review. Email me at [email protected] with the word ARC and I will add you.

One question, just for fun: when you read about a death everyone calls “fate,” do you read it as an omen, or a motive? Hit reply.

Stay suspicious of everyone. It is just good practice.

Jessie Clark