Genre

Cozy Mystery

Amateur sleuths, village secrets and crimes solved over tea — mysteries that murder without malice.

4 books · free ⌈20%⌉ samples · the rest with Dracon Omni

Cozy Mystery on the shelf

A Book of Small Deaths

The Atlantic wind howls against the cliffs as Maren Halliday steers her rental car into the salt-worn town of Blackthorn Cove, where the past isn’t just remembered, it’s preserved in meticulous, handwritten ledgers. Hired to catalog the estate of a reclusive historian, she expects dusty archives and faded photographs, not the cryptic marginalia that hints at a string of deaths stretching back decades. The locals call them accidents. The ledgers call them something else. When a fisherman washes ashore with his throat slit and a page from the estate’s records clutched in his fist, Maren realizes the town’s secrets aren’t just historical, they’re alive. The deeper she digs, the more the ledgers seem to rewrite themselves, as if the past is correcting its own narrative. But who’s pulling the strings? The retired detective who warns her to leave? The innkeeper with a missing daughter? Or the ocean itself, which has claimed more than its share of souls? With each small death, the stakes grow clearer: Maren’s name is already in the book. The only question is whether she’ll close it before the final chapter is written, or become another entry in Blackthorn Cove’s bloody history.

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Eowyn Quennell

by Eowyn Quennell

Dead Letters and Pecan Pie

For twenty-three years, Eugenia Crick has opened the Hollow Creek post office before sunrise, her brass key as familiar in her hand as a prayer. So when Postmaster Hiram Pettigrew is found dead in his office clutching a letter addressed to a woman who died two decades ago, Eugenia knows something is terribly wrong. The letter is meant for Birdie Lou Pemberton's mother, a woman who never received it. Now Birdie Lou has it, and someone in Hollow Creek will do anything to keep the contents buried. Sheriff Dale Tatum is more interested in his re-election than an old letter, and Deputy Carla Jessup's questions keep running into walls of Southern silence. As Eugenia digs deeper, she uncovers a web of debts, betrayals, and a courthouse fire that may not have been an accident at all. With the help of her sharp-tongued mother Pauline and the meddling but well-meaning women of her Friday night pie circle, Eugenia must outwit a killer who knows her every move. But when another body turns up and the letter's secret threatens to tear the town apart, Eugenia realizes the truth may cost more than she's willing to pay, and silence in Hollow Creek has never been free.

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Astrid Inglemoor

by Astrid Inglemoor

The Frost Beneath Stillwater

Nova comes home to Stillwater, a rain-battered Pacific Northwest town she's spent years trying to forget, and the past rises to meet her in a photograph of a girl no one will claim. Sheriff Dale Mercer treats the image as a curiosity; Margie Holloway treats it as a wound. But when Nova starts asking the wrong questions, the quiet fractures , a Voice begins threading through phone lines and police scanners, a Watcher materializes in her peripheral vision, and a Shooter takes a position nobody can find. Tom Eriksson and Edwin Pace, old friends with older debts, close ranks around secrets that have festered for decades, while Harlan Dodd and Cecil Moran circle with motives of their own. When Josiah Calloway surfaces with a warning and the FBI arrives with questions, Nova realizes the photograph is not a mystery to be solved but a fuse to be lit. Every answer she uncovers pulls the lake's bottom closer to the surface , and the thing watching from the water is no longer content to wait. To protect the people she once left behind, Nova must choose between the truth that will save Stillwater and the lie that has kept it breathing.

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Gray Frost

by Gray Frost

The Frost Cipher

Wren Avery steps off the train into Hollow Pines expecting quiet and cold, what she finds is a town holding its breath. A decade ago, a coded letter was sent from this harbor and never decoded. Now its author is dead, the recipient is silent, and a dying man hands Wren a copy of the cipher with a single instruction: solve it. As she begins to map the town’s careful secrets, Wren draws the attention of Calder Marsh, a man who knew the dead woman better than he admits, and Hattie Brioche, whose sharp tongue hides a longer memory. The longer she stays, the more the town seems to conspire against her, Hattie’s guarded sister Mira, the young Ezra Thatch chasing a story no one wants told, the housekeeper Ottilie Penn who knows every locked room, and Dr. Una Vance, whose kindness may be its own kind of mask. Even Posy Grieve and the ailing Old Man Grieve seem to be waiting for Wren to uncover what they cannot say. Each decoded line of the cipher peels back another layer of the town, and each layer draws the danger closer. Wren came to Hollow Pines to escape, but the cipher is beginning to suggest she was chosen for a reason, and that finishing it may cost her everything the town has worked so hard to bury.

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