My first novel comes out on Tuesday, August 4, 2026. It is called Fixed to Death, and it is the first book of The Repair Café Mysteries. It will be a Kindle ebook to begin with, and the pre-order opens later this month.
If you have been reading The Notebook since March, you already know where it takes place. I have been building Gault Mills here in the open, one Tuesday at a time, and calling it almanac and craft as I went. It was the setting the whole time.
The river came first, in The Town and the River. After that came the closed mill and what a town keeps once the work that made it is gone, in What a Closed Mill Leaves Behind. The cat asleep in the shop window turns out to have a job in the novel, which I wrote about in What the Cat Does All Day. You have been walking around inside the book for months without my saying so.
The person who solves these books is Connie Sadler. She read broken machines for a living before she came to Gault Mills, working out what failed, when it failed, and who had last touched it, and now she keeps a repair shop on Main Street. Toasters and clocks and sewing machines cross her counter, and every so often a piece of evidence does too. Sometimes one of those repairs turns out to be a crime, and she works it with the same tools she brings to the rest.
These are fair-play mysteries. That means the reader is shown every piece of evidence the detective gets, at the moment it matters, and a careful reader can reach the answer before she does. I wrote about what that promise costs a writer over in the craft notes, and I will not make the case again now.
Between now and launch there is a cover to show you, a few more stories out of the shop, and a countdown once the pre-order is live. The Notebook keeps its usual Tuesday through all of it. The town has been here since March. Now it has a book living in it.