Spring Forward

March in Hollowmere, Vermont, means sap running, the lake ice going gray, and a town meeting called to vote on tearing down the clock tower. The insurance engineer who condemned the tower is found dead in Walt Brannigan's sugarhouse the morning after the Winter Festival, the same night the clocks went forward. Walt's old kitchen clock was knocked off its nail when he fell, and it stopped at twenty-four minutes past two. Walt was home alone, his dog was loose, and he had told the whole town nobody would put a hand on that tower. The state police like Walt for it. So does the clock. But clockmaker Nell Thorne knows two things the police don't. Harriet Pell sets every clock Walt owns four minutes fast, and nobody springs a sugarhouse clock forward on festival night. And when Nell winds a clock that has stopped, she hears the last minute before it stopped. Between a friendly engineer who installed the tower's crack gauges, a Select Board chair who wants the tower gone, a historical society president who lies for the man she loves, and an old fisherman who logs every light on Ridge Road in Greenwich time and won't show the police, everyone is keeping somebody's hours. Then Walt brings Nell a small white alarm clock that once stood by her own bed and hasn't been wound since the night her mother left town. Nell winds it, and hears a voice she hasn't heard since she was twelve. Spring Forward is the fourth 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.