Endpapers and Epitaphs - The Whitlode Book Rounds, #1

A dead man's library holds one book that should not exist. She is the only soul in three counties who can read what it is hiding.

Odella Wexhollow values the private libraries the Marlbourne Wolds keep giving up, and she has learned that nobody calls a book scout for a happy reason. So when the reclusive collector Cornelius Wraxbourne is found dead at his reading desk, his heart quietly given out, Odella arrives at the long gravel drive to catalogue ten thousand volumes and settle a grieving house before the auction.

She finds the death was tidy. Too tidy.

A treasured book worn soft by a lifetime of loving hands, inscribed to a child in a careful copperplate, and printed three years after the old man died. A cup of cold tea sweetened for a man who took no sugar for sixty years. A single wiped gap in three weeks of honest dust. And her old lurcher Foxe, who lies flat against one wrong shelf and will not be moved.

Every clue is a thing on a page, plain in the light for anyone with the eye to read it. Odella has the eye. And the gentlest, most grateful soul in that cold house is counting on the fact that no one else does.

With a young apprentice at her elbow, a dry county detective who cannot tell a first edition from a phone book, and eighteen days before the vans come and carry the evidence away one green board at a time, Odella must read a life off its shelves and name a killer the only way she knows how. By the books.

A warm, clean, fair-play cozy mystery for readers who like their murders bloodless, their sleuths bookish, and their villages full of secrets shelved in plain sight. No gore, no bad language, a puzzle you can solve from your own armchair, and a dog who is a better detective than anyone will admit. The first Whitlode Book Round.