Notes from the Bench

Pre-orders for Fixed to Death are open, and the cover is the premise in one image, a mended cash register set in a lit shop window.

The case had not come down off that cabinet in years. The boy knew it for a fact, and he built his whole plan around it.

Before I draft a page I know who, how, why, and what the crime left behind. Everything else is built to put that trace in my detective's path.

Fixed to Death, the first Repair Café Mystery, is a Kindle ebook out August 4, 2026. If you have been reading The Notebook, you already know its town.

June brings the estate sales out along the Sound. I go for the small broken machines, and I come home with something harder to price, the arrangement of a whole life laid out on card tables.