Nan Truesdale: author on Booklabria

Nan Truesdale · Booklabria

Sep 18, 2026

Series Update

The Teasel Depot Mysteries one book

The Teasel Depot Mysteries: what the series is

A week in, a note on what the Teasel Depot Mysteries are, for anyone deciding whether to move in. Somebody Else's Ashes is the first of them. The town stays: Teasel, Pennsylvania, one pharmacy with a lunch counter, one funeral home, one Grange Hall, a rail branch that runs twice a day and complains about it. The sleuth stays: Harriet Pell, lost property clerk, no gun, no badge, no intention of minding her own business. The basement full of things nobody came back for stays, and so does the list she keeps of them. What the series promises, every time. A body by the end of chapter two, because that is the genre and I do not negotiate the genre. Suspects you can count on one hand plus two by the quarter mark. Every one of them with a secret that is not murder, and every one of those secrets resolved on the page. Nothing that will make you flinch. An ending on the town, not the case. And one thing in every book that does not get fixed. No dates for what comes next, because I do not put dates on things I have not finished. You will hear it from me here first. What is the one item in your house you would go to the depot to claim?

Nan Truesdale

Sep 11, 2026

Release Announcement

Out now

Somebody Else's Ashes

Out today, 11 September 2026 · The Teasel Depot Mysteries, book 1

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Somebody Else's Ashes is out today

Somebody Else's Ashes is out today on Kindle. The paperback is not on sale yet. I will say so here when it is. It is a warm, funny, fair-play mystery, and I mean each of those words in its plain sense. Warm: the town does as much of the work as the murder does, and the town is eleven hundred and forty people who all know what the four-twelve sounds like. Funny: the narration is flat and the people are not. Fair-play: every clue the reader needs is on the page before the answer is. You can solve it. Hattie usually gets there first, but you are welcome to try. Low violence, nothing on the page. The town has a funeral home and a train that comes twice a day, and that is as dark as the furniture gets. One more thing, because I promised it and I keep it. Every book in this series leaves exactly one thing unrepaired. Something the murder neither caused nor solved. That is the price of a mystery told honestly, and I would rather pay it than pretend the town was fixed by the last page. Sixty chapters, none of them long. The lost property room is open. What did you leave on a train once and never go back for?

Nan Truesdale

Aug 21, 2026

Studio Note

The first page: the Saturday sack

Friday, 21 August

Three weeks out

Three weeks to Somebody Else's Ashes. Here is the first page, and one note on it. The book opens on Hattie working. Not on the town, not on the weather, not on anybody's feelings. On a woman with her hands in a sack of things the railroad found, doing the sacks in order because that is the rule. I wanted the first thing you learned about her to be that she has a procedure, and the second thing to be that she has a rule about the procedure, and the third thing to be that the rule is not the reason. The urn is brass. She checks. Nine inches, squared shoulders, the plain kind, the kind that gets ordered when somebody has asked for something that will not look like anything. The letters on the plate are cut, not etched, with the little burr on the inside of the curves that you can feel with a fingertip. That is one sentence, and it took longer than the chapter around it, and I do not regret it. That is provenance. It is the whole of how Hattie sees the world, and it is the whole of how she solves things. Everything arrives with a history and a claimant. Even an urn. What is the heaviest thing you ever found at the bottom of a bag? From Somebody Else's Ashes, chapter one: The thing at the bottom of the Saturday sack came up heavy and wrong, and Hattie Pell had it in both hands before she knew what it was, which almost never happened to her. It was an urn. Brass, or brass-plated over something cheaper. She scratched the base with a thumbnail and it stayed brass, so brass. Nine inches, squared shoulders, the plain kind, the kind that got ordered when somebody had asked for something that would not look like anything. A screw-down lid with a bead of clear sealant run round the seam, neatly, by somebody who had done it before. On the front, a plate. Engraved, not etched: cut letters, the sort a shop did on a pantograph, with the little burr on the inside of the curves that you could feel with a fingertip.

The Teasel Depot Mysteries · Book 1

Somebody Else's Ashes

Nan Truesdale

Jul 21, 2026

Release Announcement

Out now

Somebody Else's Ashes

Out 11 September 2026 · The Teasel Depot Mysteries, book 1

View book

Somebody Else's Ashes, 11 September. A sealed urn, a living woman's name.

The first Teasel Depot mystery comes out on 11 September. It is called Somebody Else's Ashes and I will tell you the setup, since that is the part I am allowed to tell. Teasel, Pennsylvania has eleven hundred and forty people, one pharmacy, one funeral home, and a train that comes twice a day. Harriet Pell has kept the lost property room at the Teasel Depot for twenty-two years, and before that she spent nineteen years deciding whether people's accounts of their own belongings were true. She can tell you who owned a thing. She can usually tell you what they lied about. What she has never once been able to do is leave a thing unattributed. So when a brass cremation urn comes off the four-twelve engraved with the name of a woman who is alive, and sitting in the Grange Hall that afternoon with a cash box, Hattie carries it up Chapel Street and sets it on the shelf in front of her. By six that evening the woman is dead at the foot of fourteen wooden steps, the county coroner is calling it a fall, and only the lost property clerk is arguing. Every clue is on the page. Nothing on the page will make you flinch. And the sleuth is nobody's idea of nice. What would you do with an urn that had your name on it? Hattie put it behind the card box. That was the rule.

Author Journal

The Teasel Depot Mysteries one book

Somebody Else's Ashes

The first page: the Saturday sack

Somebody Else's Ashes