Preserved Lies, Private Fires

In quiet towns, the most dangerous weapon isn’t a gun. It’s a story, tidy, sympathetic, and repeated until nobody remembers to check the receipts.

This collection delivers four true-crime–inspired, cozy-leaning whodunits told in first-person by everyday sleuths who know systems: a prairie pharmacy assistant who understands restricted paper trails, a church lunch coordinator who can reconstruct a cup’s journey from hand to hand, a canning-club organizer who spots “expertise” performed as camouflage, and a volunteer fire-auxiliary member who knows when a scene is trying too hard to look like an accident.

Each case is privacy-masked and grounded in publicly reported outcomes, but the puzzles are fair-play: readers get the same clean clue set the narrator does, logs, timelines, sourcing contradictions, and one fatal moment where someone overexplains what they shouldn’t know. No gore. No cheap shocks. Just methodical pressure, human motive, and the satisfying click of a locked sequence.

When evidence hides in kitchens, fellowship halls, and ash patterns, the truth doesn’t need to shout. It only needs to be documented.