Fair-play investigation
The mystery is built to stand on evidence, motive, chronology, contradictions, and professional skepticism. The paranormal layer complicates the case; it does not solve it.
Hawthorne Reach Echo Mysteries · Book 1
Murder, Itemized
A Midlife Witch Paranormal Cozy Mystery
An old house. A dead man. A gift Cora Whitcomb is not ready to believe in.
At forty-six, divorced and newly back in Hawthorne Reach, New Hampshire, Cora expects to rebuild her life by taking over her late aunt’s estate business. She knows how to spot fraud in paperwork, provenance, and possessions. She does not expect a murder.
The Mystery
Some inventories become evidence.
When executor Edwin Kersey dies inside one of the town’s oldest houses, the inventory he was desperate to verify becomes evidence—and Cora’s professional instincts pull her into the case.
Then certain objects begin striking her with flashes of grief, anger, and memory. A Victorian mourning locket is the strongest yet. The impressions are incomplete, unreliable, and never enough to name a killer. But they point toward missing heirlooms, buried resentments, and a secret someone has protected for years.
With a wary detective, a smoke-gray cat who notices too much, and a town where history refuses to stay quiet, Cora must separate inheritance from deception before another truth is buried for good.
Inside Book One
What to expect in Murder, Itemized
A midlife second chance
Cora is forty-six, experienced, divorced, and rebuilding a life rather than discovering adulthood for the first time.
Estate work with consequences
Inventories, provenance, disputed possessions, old houses, and the paper trails people leave behind form a practical engine for the mystery.
Quiet paranormal tension
The Echoes arrive as incomplete sensory and emotional fragments. They can point toward a better question, but never toward an automatic answer.
Book One Release
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