Hi reader,

Monday is Jessie Clark, and Jessie has had a summer. Let me catch you up in order of temperature.

Out now: Bonneville Shadows (Utah Shadows, Book 2)

Cassidy Rourke died on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The police closed the case in nine days and called it an accident. Her brother did not believe them, so he called the one person who might: Gillian Jones, the woman who exposed Project Canyon Ghost and barely lived through it. She swore she was finished. She goes anyway.

What Gillian finds out on the salt, where the horizon lies and the ground itself can swallow a truck whole, is worse than a murder. It is a machine that can reach into a crowd and rewrite what those people see, remember, and believe, and a proving ground littered with racers who lose a day and cannot say where it went. To stop a test only days away from being run on ten thousand unsuspecting people, Gillian has to trust her memory in the one place on earth built to make that impossible. The catch, and the reason she has a chance at all: she has never trusted her own memory. She trusts the record. It may be the only mind the machine cannot reach.

Some things the desert takes. Some things it is paid to erase.

If you loved Blake Crouch's Dark Matter and Recursion, this one was written for you. It is book two of the Utah Shadows thrillers but reads as a standalone, so you can start here. It is live now: https://www.jlcollinspublishing.com/books

Coming Friday, August 21: Feathers and Phantoms (The Winifred Baxter Mysteries, Book 3)

An iron key opens a house on the hill that has been shut for thirty-five years, and Winifred Baxter's crow will not be parted from it. Up on Harrow Hill, the old Merrick place is opening at last, and the town remembers its ghost: a governess who died on the tower stair a lifetime ago and has walked the house ever since. When the last of the Merricks comes home to sell it and dies at the foot of that same stair, the town calls it the phantom, and the town's beloved old doctor calls it a rotten step and enough of this ghost nonsense. They are both wrong. Winifred has seen the girl at the window. She has watched her point. But a dead woman's testimony will not stand in any court, and the man who murdered her has spent thirty-five years teaching a whole town not to believe its own eyes.

Here is how it opens:

"By October the iron key would not stay in the bowl, and I had stopped pretending I did not know why."

A fair-play paranormal cozy. Sweet, closed-door, and deeply suspicious of the most reasonable man in the room. Book three, and a clean place to start if you are new to Winifred.

Still on the shelf if you missed July: The Honest Man, the locked-study murder that should not be possible, and Something Wicked This Way Brews, a paranormal cozy with a tea-shop witch, a dead professor, and a very judgmental cat. Both here: https://www.jlcollinspublishing.com/books

Subscriber first look: reply with the word KEY and I will send you the opening pages of Feathers and Phantoms before it goes anywhere else.

Want to read Jessie early, for free? Join Read It First, our launch team, and tick the Jessie Clark box on the form. You get advance copies about three weeks ahead of release in exchange for one honest review, and Feathers and Phantoms is going out to the team now: https://readitfirst-jlcollinspublishing.beehiiv.com/p/read-it-first. And if Bonneville Shadows landed for you, an honest review this week is the kindest thing you can do for it.

📌 Two-second favor: this week's Feathers and Phantoms pin is up on Pinterest. Tap Save so more cozy-mystery readers find it: [PIN URL — paste the live pin link when building in Beehiv] (pinterest.com/jlcollinspublishing)

Reply and settle something for me: in a haunted-house cozy, do you want the ghost to be real, or do you want a perfectly rational explanation that turns out to be a lie? Hit reply.

Happy reading,

Jessie Clark

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