Second Hand Secrets

It's Christmas in Hollowmere, Vermont, and Ruthie Vance's swap meet has a new organizer. After thirty-one years of card tables, hot cider and secondhand treasures, wealthy newcomer Loretta Finch has taken it over with a clipboard, a checkbook and a list of rules. Then Loretta raises a mug of Ruthie's cider "to the woman who started it all," and by three o'clock she's dead. The poison is Ruthie's own heart medication. The mug is Ruthie's own mug. And the county prosecutor wants somebody arrested before Christmas. Clockmaker Nell Thorne knows Ruthie didn't do it. Proving it will take every trick from her old job as an insurance fraud investigator, a dead photographer's boxes of negatives, a sheriff who has finally learned how she takes her coffee, and one more listen to an antique clock that stopped at two minutes to ten. Because the deeper Nell digs into Hollowmere's old photographs, the clearer it gets that this murder didn't start at the swap meet. It started on a snowy December night twelve years ago, and somebody will do anything to keep that night buried. Second Hand Secrets is the second book in the Hollowmere Clock Shop Mysteries, a cozy series with a stubborn heroine, a slow-burn sheriff, a one-eared cat with opinions, and clocks that remember everything. Each book is a complete mystery. Complete mystery. No cliffhangers. No gore, no explicit scenes. A slow-burn romance. A town you'll want to move to.