The Last Sale at Thistle & Vine

Then a box of mail-order books comes back returned, and pressed inside one of them, like a bookmark, is a note in block capitals — a threat, addressed to the appraiser Nell has just hired to value the stock. Four days later Edwin Prentiss is found at the foot of the shop's cellar stairs, and the county calls it a fall. Nell spent thirty years in probate litigation watching heirs move assets before the count. She knows what an inventory looks like when someone has been hollowing it out for years. A dead man in the wrong glasses, his flashlight left up on the bench. A shelf of first editions that are not first editions. A 24-hour parcel receipt printed at 11:52 the night a careful woman swears she was home for the nine o'clock news.

Between Saturday bean suppers at the Grange, hot-flash nights at a clue board taped to her dead aunt's kitchen wall, and a cousin who says the things nobody else will, Nell works the one case nobody hired her for — in a town that loved the victim, where the warmest person keeps the coldest arithmetic, and where the answer to why Cass Thistle cut off her own family has been locked in a chest upstairs for forty-two years.