Hi reader,

Monday is Jessie Clark, and Jessie has one arriving in four days and one already out. Let me take them in order.

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

Up on Harrow Hill, the old Merrick place is opening at last, thirty-five years after it was shut, 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 hysteria. They are both wrong. Winifred Baxter 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. To hang him, Pelican Cove's own arch-skeptic will have to do the one thing she has never done: trust what she sees, and then prove it.

Here is what the town says about the girl at the window, in the words of Pelican Cove's own gossip-in-chief:

"They say when the Harrow Hill girl shows herself, it's not idle. She shows herself when the hill's about to take another soul."

Some hauntings are a warning. This one is a witness. A fair-play paranormal cozy, sweet and closed-door, following Caws and Effect and A Murder of Crows, and a clean place to start if Winifred is new to you.

Also on the shelf, if you have been meaning to get to them: Bonneville Shadows, the salt-flats thriller from two weeks ago about a machine that can rewrite what a crowd remembers, and from July, The Honest Man, a locked-study murder that should not be possible, and Something Wicked This Way Brews, a cozy with a tea-shop witch, a dead professor and a very judgmental cat. All here: https://www.jlcollinspublishing.com/books

Last call on the subscriber first look: reply with the word KEY before Friday and I will send you the opening chapter of Feathers and Phantoms ahead of release. If you replied last week, yours is already on its way.

Want to read Jessie early, for free? Join Read It First, our launch team, and tick the Jessie Clark box. Advance copies about three weeks ahead of release in exchange for one honest review, and Feathers and Phantoms is going out to the team right 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 tell me which one unsettles you more: a house that everyone in town believes is haunted, or a man that everyone in town believes is harmless. I know which one I wrote the book about.

Happy reading,

While you wait for Friday. The house has a podcast now, Story Worlds from JL Collins Publishing and Glassbound Ink, and the first episode, "Every Book Is a Doorway," is very much a Jessie kind of subject: how a story lets you into a place you have never been through an opening about the size of a page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxrgNNk8yik

Jessie Clark

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