Killer in the Carriage House: A Victorian Village Mystery

by Sheila Connolly

Overview

Welcome back to Asheboro, Maryland, where real estate can be a matter of life and death. Killer in the Carriage House is the second book in the Victorian Village Mystery series from New York Times bestselling author Sheila Connolly.

Coming back to her hometown was never on the agenda for hotelier Kate Hamilton. But when she’s offered a chance to lead the charge of transforming the landscape into a Victorian village and tourist attraction, Kate can’t quite refuse. The only problem? Nobody in Asheboro has the passion, or the funds, to get plans off the ground. . .until Kate teams up with handsome historian Joshua Wainwright, who has ambitious ideas of his own involving an old mansion and a treasure-trove of documents that could attract investors and help seal the deal.

Then, just as Kate and Josh seem ready to pull the trigger, a dead body turns up in the town library. Do these mysterious papers spell danger instead of dollars? That’s what Kate intends to find out before all bets are off…and someone else ends up six feet under.

The Victorian Village Mystery series is:

“Enjoyable.”—Publishers Weekly

“Fascinating.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Smart.” —Booklist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250619693
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Series:	Victorian Village Mysteries , #2
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	293,058
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

SHEILA CONNOLLY has published over thirty mysteries, including several New York Times bestsellers. Her series include the Orchard Mysteries, the Museum Mysteries, The County Cork Mysteries, and the Victorian Village Mysteries. She is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of Mayflower Descendants, and owns a cottage in West Cork. She lives in a too-big Victorian in southeastern Massachusetts with her husband and three cats.

Editorial Reviews

"The layers of history and the obstacles encountered in the process of trying to save a small town provide a fascinating frame story for this smart mystery."—Booklist

"Enjoyable . . . Cozy fans will be curious to see what Kate gets up to next."—Publishers Weekly

"Fascinating."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2019-04-14
A small Maryland town struggling for survival becomes a magnet for murder.

When unemployed Kate Hamilton was asked by a former high school friend to come up with ideas to help save their hometown of Asheboro from extinction (Murder at the Mansion, 2018), she never thought she'd end up staying. The town's magnificent Barton mansion needs little work to become a tourist attraction, and a storm recently revealed that downtown Asheboro has lovely Victorian buildings hidden under modern excrescences. So Kate hopes to reinvent the town as a living history area, like a pint-sized Colonial Williamsburg. Since Asheboro's broke, Kate devises a plan to get all the merchants on board and come up with the money for restoration. She calls in archivist Carroll Peterson to root through the treasure trove of papers found in the Barton mansion in hope of finding things that could help her both historically and financially. Kate's boyfriend, Johns Hopkins professor Josh Wainwright, who serves as the mansion's caretaker while working on a project in his field of 19th-century industrialization, is more than willing to help. So is her landlord, attorney Ryan Walker, her old high school squeeze. Having received permission to use the town library, which is currently closed, to organize the paperwork once it's moved from the mansion, she and Carroll stop in to check out the space only to find a dead body partially buried under a fallen bookcase and piles of books. Because she's no more persuaded than the police that the death was an accident, Kate adds sleuthing to her list of things to do. She continues to talk to everyone she can find who has knowledge of Asheboro's past, when Barton's shovel factory was the biggest employer in the area. The key to both her plans and the murder are to be found among the secrets in the abandoned factory.

The murder plays second fiddle to the exponentially more fascinating hunt for historical data that will reveal all the answers.

Kirkus Reviews