Books

Marnie and Doug have sold the house, bought the motorhome, and promised their daughter that this trip, they’ll just be tourists. Marnie lasts about a day.

When the retired couple roll into a wine town in the Granite Belt to mind a vineyard — and three dogs they didn’t quite agree to — the welcome is warm and the scenery’s lovely. But Marnie has spent thirty years behind a café counter learning to read people, and this town is holding its breath. Everyone worships the famous wine critic. Everyone tiptoes around the formidable woman who runs the festival. And within days, that formidable woman is dead at the bottom of her own cellar steps — an accident, the whole town agrees, almost too quickly.

Doug found something wrong with the wiring. Marnie found something wrong with the grief.

Nobody asked two grey-haired blow-ins to go poking about. They’ve no standing, no authority, and a fortnight before the van rolls on. But a good man is being quietly hollowed out by a single cruel word, a careful woman has been filed away as careless, and Marnie has never in her life been able to watch a town get a person wrong and keep her hands still.

She’ll need her husband’s certainties, her daughter’s nerves, and a dog that doubles as a social passport — because the killer is the most beloved soul in the valley, and he’s just worked out that the new woman is watching.

Vintage to Die For is the first in The Open Road Mysteries: warm, wry, and twisty, featuring a couple who solve crimes one house-sit at a time. Pour a glass and settle in.

Marnie and Doug have a rule now: roll into a town, mind the house, mind the animals, and roll out again without getting involved. Doug has never once tested it. Marnie tests it about every fortnight.

When the retired couple take a hobby-farm sit outside a high-country town — a goat with opinions, a paddock of bees, and a back fence that happens to run along the grand old Jackson estate next door — the welcome’s warm and the air’s clean and the whole district is arguing about one thing: whether old Hugh Jackson will sell the place his family has held for a hundred and fifty years. Then, before the kettle’s properly boiled in, Hugh is found dead in the one paddock he’d spent thirty years too frightened to enter — stung, in among his own bees, his allergy finally catching him out. A tragic accident, the town agrees, almost too quickly.

Doug found nothing wrong with the wiring. Marnie found everything wrong with the man.

Because the whole district knew Hugh Jackson as the most careful man alive — and a careful man does not walk into the one place on earth that can kill him. Nobody asked two grey-haired blow-ins to go poking about a grieving family. They’ve no standing, no authority, a sergeant who’s already closed the file, and a fortnight before the van rolls on.

There’s a brass carriage clock on Beryl’s shelf that Doug has dusted and wound every Sunday of their marriage, and a story he’s told about it for forty years. The closer Marnie gets to how Hugh Jackson really died, the closer she gets to the one thing her husband has never told her — and to a killer who built the perfect accident, and is days from getting clean away.

Borrowed Time is the second in The Open Road Mysteries: warm, wry, and twisty, featuring a couple who solve crimes one house-sit at a time. Wind the clock and settle in.