The Pumpkin Patch Murder: A Bramblewick Harbor Bookshop Mystery

Bramblewick Harbor's Harvest Festival is Clementine Ashworth's favorite weekend of the year - a pumpkin patch, a costume parade, an antique market spilling down Wharf Street, and a packed house at The Kindled Page for the annual Halloween-night reading.Then the morning after, Everett Thorne - the town's most respected farmer, and the man who grows the prize pumpkins the whole festival is named for - is found dead in his own field. Beside him lies an old brass key that hasn't opened anything in nearly sixty years. And back at Clem's shop, a rare, obscure local history book has vanished from a locked case, stolen sometime during Friday night's crowded reading.The trail leads Clem somewhere she didn't expect: back to a Halloween ball in 1968, a grand house called Hollowmere that burned to the ground before she was born, and a young woman named Rosalind Ashgrove who never made it out. The official story has always been a tragic accident. Everett didn't believe it - and neither, once she starts digging, does Clem.Between a reclusive last heir guarding his family's oldest wound, a farm in financial trouble, an antiques dealer with a very loose relationship to provenance, and half the town's oldest families still quietly agreeing not to talk about that night - Clem has until the last pumpkin comes off the vine to figure out which sixty-year-old secret was worth killing to protect.Warm, witty, and entirely fair-play, The Pumpkin Patch Murder brings readers back to Bramblewick Harbor for a mystery about the debts that outlive the people who owe them - and the town that finally, however late, gets around to asking the right question.Some doors get locked for a reason. Can Clem find out which one - before Halloween runs out?