Hi reader,

Monday is Jessie Clark, and this Monday she has a book three days old.

Out now: Feathers and Phantoms (The Winifred Baxter Mysteries, Book 3)

Winifred Baxter keeps a bowl on her counter for the objects she cannot account for. A brass ring. A three of clubs. A bone button. She calls it a scientist's habit, holding the anomalies until an explanation arrives to collect them, and for three years that story held. Then a crow brought her an iron key, and the key started leaving the bowl on its own.

Up on Harrow Hill the old Merrick place is opening at last, thirty-five years after it was shut, and Pelican Cove remembers its ghost: a governess who died on the tower stair a lifetime ago and has walked the house 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 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 has to do the one thing she has never done: trust what she sees, and then prove it.

Here is the moment she stops being able to file it away:

She keeps a tally in the back of the accounts book, one pencil mark for each morning she finds the key out of the bowl. By the first week of October the tally has frightened her, which is not a thing Winifred says lightly, being a woman who has spent her whole life not being frightened by tallies. A tally is supposed to be a comfort. Hers had only got longer.

A fair-play paranormal cozy. Sweet, closed door, violence off the page. It follows Caws and Effect and A Murder of Crows, and it is a clean place to start if Winifred is new to you.

If you have not caught up. Bonneville Shadows came out August 7: a geologist dead on the salt flats, a case closed in nine days and called an accident, and a machine buried under the Bonneville that can reach into a crowd and rewrite what those people remember. For readers of Blake Crouch. Reads as a standalone. I wrote about it properly when it landed. And from July, The Honest Man (a locked-study murder that should not be possible) and Something Wicked This Way Brews (a tea-shop witch, a dead professor, and a very judgmental cat). All here: https://www.jlcollinspublishing.com/books

Subscriber exclusive. Reply with the word CROW and Jessie will send you the deleted opening she wrote for Feathers and Phantoms before the iron key took over the book, plus the short note on why it had to go. Subscribers only, not published anywhere.

The ask. If Feathers and Phantoms landed for you, an honest review this week is the single most useful thing you can do for it. Reviews in the first fortnight are what decide whether a cozy finds its readers or quietly disappears. And if you want to read Jessie early and free from now on, 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. https://readitfirst-jlcollinspublishing.beehiiv.com/p/read-it-first

Something to listen to while you read. There is a podcast from the house now, Story Worlds from JL Collins Publishing and Glassbound Ink. Episode one is "Every Book Is a Doorway," which is a fitting listen for a book that opens with a locked house and an iron key. Watch or listen here. A subscribe is worth a great deal to a brand-new show.

Reply and settle this one for me: Winifred keeps a bowl for the things she cannot explain. What is in yours? The odd object you have never thrown away and could not tell anyone why. Hit reply, I want to hear about it.

Happy reading,

Jessie Clark

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