Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Neela Snow
Series: A Claire Winters Cozy Mystery
The Book: Claire Winters has poured enough coffee at The Cozy Nook Café to know when a summer morning in Millfield is about to go sideways. When the town rolls out its Heritage Picnic & Paths Festival—scenic walks, riverside picnics, the cheerful nostalgia small towns do best—she's expecting a busy, happy weekend. What she gets is the festival's organizer, dead on the old boathouse trail, and a celebration that stops cold.
The trouble is, the victim had a real talent for making enemies behind a polished smile, and Millfield is suddenly full of people who won't miss her. With her journalist friend digging through the town's dusty records, a deputy trying to keep the investigation on the rails, and a quietly supportive brown tabby overseeing the whole affair, Claire starts pulling threads—and every one of them leads back to Camp Alder, a long-shuttered summer camp shadowed by a tragedy the town never truly faced.
A furious trail guide and a former camper carrying painful memories both had reason to want the organizer gone. But the deeper Claire follows the winding paths between buried lies and present-day corruption, the clearer it becomes that someone in Millfield will do anything to keep the past exactly where it has been all these years—out of sight. Some trails, it turns out, were closed for a reason.
“A festival organizer dead on the boathouse trail, a shuttered summer camp nobody wants to talk about, and a café owner too stubborn to leave it alone—that’s a premise I can get behind. Claire Winters is the kind of sleuth I have a soft spot for: nosy for the right reasons, and smart enough to follow the quiet trail instead of the loud one. If Millfield sounds like the sort of town you’d happily spend a hot weekend untangling, you’ll be in good company here.”
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