A Repair Café Mystery · Book Two
Dead
Short
The wiring has its own account of that night, and nobody has ever asked it for one.
A Repair Café Mystery · Book Two
The wiring has its own account of that night, and nobody has ever asked it for one.
Book Two
Ten years ago a lineman named Roland Strom died under the Gault Mills Christmas display. The county ruled that he went up after his own lights in an ice storm and that the storm did the rest. The town has told it that way ever since.
Now the council has voted to relight the display, and every foot of the old wiring comes to Connie Sadler's bench to be passed or condemned. The contractor sets down nine crates and gives her one warning. They will hang whatever she passes, and 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. The wiring has its own account of that night, and nobody has ever asked it for one.
A repair ticket does not close on a guess. It closes when the fault is found and named, and Connie Sadler has never closed one any other way.
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 somebody in Gault Mills has been counting for ten years on nobody asking now.
Book 2 of The Repair Café Mysteries. A fair-play cozy mystery in a small Pacific Northwest mill town at Christmas, with physical clues, a retired failure analyst who reads evidence instead of people, a postmistress who handles the news as she handled the mail, and a three-legged cat named Bus asleep on the crates.
Start the series
Out now in Kindle and paperback. The first Repair Café Mystery, and the one that opens the shop.
Consuelo "Connie" Sadler spent thirty years at Boeing asking machines why they died. Failure analysis, they called it. Take the broken thing apart, measure the wear, find the fault the owner will never admit to. She didn't expect the habit to outlast the paycheck. She certainly didn't expect it to turn up a murder.
Two years widowed, Connie has traded the city for Gault Mills, her late husband's fading mill town in the Pacific Northwest foothills, and hung a shingle over what used to be the family hardware store: Open Ticket Repair, where the whole town carries in whatever has stopped working and mostly carries it home again. She keeps a notebook for every job, a three-legged cat named Bus in the front window, a retired postmistress who sorts mail that isn't hers and reads all the return addresses, and a quiet man at the next bench she's started to notice she notices.
It must sit in the shop window where the whole town can watch Connie make it right.
For the first time in a long while, life keeps ordinary hours. Then Sylvia Odegard, the imperious last daughter of the family that built the town, brings in a 1911 cash register that has "stopped keeping count honestly," with one strange condition. Days later, Sylvia is dead at the bottom of her cellar stairs, and Gault Mills settles on the easy word for it. Accident.
Connie has spent a career reading what broken things reveal about the people who handled them, and too much about Sylvia's death refuses to add up. The county has closed the file, the police chief wants the matter dropped, and Sylvia's estate is already being packed up for sale. Every trace of what really happened is about to scatter to the highest bidder—and she isn't about to let anyone mark this ticket closed until the truth is accounted for.
Out November 14
Book Two of The Repair Café Mysteries arrives on Kindle November 14, 2026. Pre-order now and it lands on your device the morning it is out. New to the series? Fixed to Death is out now in Kindle and paperback.
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