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Hi reader,
Monday belongs to Jessie Clark, and Jessie has been busy on both of her streets: the sweet, ghost-ridden one and the cold, forensic one. Two chills on the way, two very different temperatures. Pick yours.
The cozy one: Feathers and Phantoms
The Winifred Baxter Mysteries. Up on Harrow Hill, the old Merrick place is opening for the first time in thirty-five years, and the town still 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 you cannot put a ghost on the stand, and the man who did it has spent thirty-five years teaching a whole town not to believe its own eyes.
A fair-play paranormal cozy: sweet, closed-door, and deeply suspicious of the most reasonable man in the room.
The cold one: The Cold Hour
A Vale and Ward case. A forensic auditor is found strangled inside the Halvorsen vault, a sealed, climate-controlled records room two floors below the street. The badge logs prove no one entered or left during the only hour she could have died. The one man with a reason to want her silenced was on camera across the city the entire time. A murder in a room no one entered, in an hour no suspect could have used. Detective Cass Vale cannot let it go, because she cannot forget, and something about the cold in that vault is wrong. If you have never read a Vale and Ward book, this is a clean place to start.
"The alibi was perfect. That is how she knew the hour was a lie."
Watch for both on the shelf here, a couple of Jessie's newest are landing any day now: https://www.jlcollinspublishing.com/books
Subscriber first look: reply with the word CROW and I will send you the opening pages of Feathers and Phantoms before they go anywhere else.
New to Winifred? She started small, in a seaside town that keeps calling perfectly ordinary murders "omens." Start at Book One and you will fly through the series.
Want to read Jessie first? Her books are part of Read It First, the JL Collins Publishing launch team: advance copies, free, for an honest review. Reply with the word JESSIE and I will add you, and send a bonus scene to start.
Reply and settle a long-standing debate for me: is a ghost who points at the killer a cheat, or exactly the kind of witness a fair-play mystery has always secretly wanted?
📌 Save this week's pin: I pinned the cover for Feathers and Phantoms on Pinterest. Tap Save so more mystery readers find it, it takes two seconds: [PIN URL — paste the live pin link when building in Beehiv]. Find Jessie at pinterest.com/jlcollinspublishing
Happy reading,
Jessie Clark
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