The Coroner of Crestwood. A Charming Cozy Whodunit of a Poisoned Legacy and a Long-Kept Alibi, and the Past That Wouldn't Stay Dead

The young woman in the white dress was still rocking when they found her. But the chair moved alone. She was already dead. Martin Harwood is the coroner of Crestwood - a grieving widower who can't bring himself to fix the broken music box on his kitchen table, the one his late wife wound every night. He knows every family in this fading Appalachian mill town. He buried half of them himself. So when Sheriff Pritchard calls him out to the old mill at dawn, Martin expects a sad, simple death. He gets a stranger in a white dress, a stopped rocking chair, and a single drooping foxglove - the prettiest poison in these hills. "You figure it's natural?" asks Nell Vance, the sharp young deputy riding shotgun, freshly back from the Pittsburgh police force with a chip on her shoulder and a chin scar she never explains. "I figure I'll know when I see her, " Martin says. He knows the moment he sees her. This was murder.
And the dead girl nobody claims is tangled in a secret that runs back decades - to the decaying Vance mansion on the hill, to a poisoned legacy, to a long-kept alibi that's about to come apart. The town wants it quiet. Sheriff Pritchard wants his pension and his clean conscience. But Martin has spent his whole life believing every body has a story worth telling - and this one is screaming. A burned note.
A daughter's hidden diary. A lullaby playing in an empty room. A confession in a green car at midnight. The closer Martin and Nell get to the truth, the more it costs them - because in Crestwood, the past doesn't stay buried. It just waits in a rocking chair for someone brave enough to listen. The Coroner of Crestwood is a charming, atmospheric cozy whodunit about a poisoned legacy, a long-kept alibi, an unlikely investigative pair, old family secrets, and a small mountain town where the past refuses to stay dead. Perfect for readers who love cozy mysteries, amateur-sleuth whodunits, atmospheric small-town settings, unlikely detective duos, and slow-burning puzzles with a darker edge.
A standalone mystery you'll devour in one sitting.