KILLER IN THE CARRIAGE HOUSE

A small Maryland town struggling for survival becomes a magnet for murder.

When unemployed Kate Hamilton was asked by a former high school friend to come up with ideas to help save their hometown of Asheboro from extinction (Murder at the Mansion, 2018), she never thought she’d end up staying. The town’s magnificent Barton mansion needs little work to become a tourist attraction, and a storm recently revealed that downtown Asheboro has lovely Victorian buildings hidden under modern excrescences. So Kate hopes to reinvent the town as a living history area, like a pint-sized Colonial Williamsburg. Since Asheboro’s broke, Kate devises a plan to get all the merchants on board and come up with the money for restoration. She calls in archivist Carroll Peterson to root through the treasure trove of papers found in the Barton mansion in hope of finding things that could help her both historically and financially. Kate’s boyfriend, Johns Hopkins professor Josh Wainwright, who serves as the mansion’s caretaker while working on a project in his field of 19th-century industrialization, is more than willing to help. So is her landlord, attorney Ryan Walker, her old high school squeeze. Having received permission to use the town library, which is currently closed, to organize the paperwork once it’s moved from the mansion, she and Carroll stop in to check out the space only to find a dead body partially buried under a fallen bookcase and piles of books. Because she’s no more persuaded than the police that the death was an accident, Kate adds sleuthing to her list of things to do. She continues to talk to everyone she can find who has knowledge of Asheboro’s past, when Barton’s shovel factory was the biggest employer in the area. The key to both her plans and the murder are to be found among the secrets in the abandoned factory.

The murder plays second fiddle to the exponentially more fascinating hunt for historical data that will reveal all the answers.