Release Announcement
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.