There is a second book. It is called Dead Short, it is the second Repair Café Mystery, and it arrives on Kindle on Saturday, November 14, 2026. The pre-order is open now. You can reserve a copy here, and it will be on your Kindle the morning of the fourteenth without any more from you.
Fixed to Death came out in August. This one follows it by a little over three months, which was never the plan. The second book was mostly written before the first one was out, and once the first was out there was no good reason to leave the second in a drawer until spring. So here it is, with the rain back for good on the Sound and the dark coming down before five.
The book
The story is set in Gault Mills in December, from the first of the month to Christmas. It is Connie Sadler's second Christmas in the town.
Ten years before the story begins, a lineman named Roland Strom died under the town's Christmas display. The county ruled that he went up after his own lights in an ice storm and that the storm did the rest, and the town has told it that way ever since. The display has not been lit since. It went into crates, the crates went into storage, and every December after that has been a dark one on Main, with a wreath on one pole and nothing on the rest.
Now the council has voted to relight it. Every string and frame comes to Connie's bench first, to be passed or condemned, and the contractor who sets the nine crates down on her floor gives her one warning. They will hang whatever she passes, and they will stand the whole town under it.
Connie spent thirty years at Boeing asking broken machines what happened to them. The crates hold a decade of storage, a season of storm repairs, and one string with a county tag on it from the night Roland died. Under her lamp, the damage on that string has an edge that weather does not leave.
That is as far as I will take you. The widow takes the dead man's star off Connie's bench in broad daylight and walks it up Main. The contractor is a man everyone likes. The police chief has a closed file and no reason to open it. And a repair ticket, in Connie's shop, does not close on a guess. It closes when the fault is found and named.
The cover
The cover is a shop window again, this time framed in deep blue, with orange side panels and cream capitals. Inside the window, on a navy display box, is a five-pointed star of weathered gray metal with fourteen round marquee bulbs lit warm white. A coil of dark braided cable lies beside it, bound with a strip of blue tape over its brass ends, and wired to the coil is a manila tag that reads RETAINED. Above the star, DEAD is set in teal and SHORT in orange, with a small coral lightning bolt between them. The series line runs along the top, A Repair Café Mystery, Book Two.
The Notebook has always been text-first, so the picture lives on the book's page at the store, where you can see it at full size. The star is what the town wants back. The coil with the tag on it is what the town put away. Both of them are on the same bench now, and that is the book.
Between now and the fourteenth
The Notebook keeps its Tuesdays. Next week I will write about the display itself, the poles down Main and the frame over the crossing, and what a small town does with ten dark Decembers. The week after that, a craft post on wire, and what a materials analyst sees in a cord that has been in a crate for ten years. Then the book.
If you would rather have the launch note in your inbox, The Shop's Bell goes out on Saturdays, and the next issue goes out this Saturday.
Last Christmas was Connie Sadler's first in Gault Mills. This Christmas the town sends her its lights. I think that is the right order of things, and I hope you will come and see what she does with them.