Pulled Under

About Pulled Under

Winter belongs to the locals in Honeysuckle Harbor, and Hazel Brennan loves the off-season Harbor best of all — the tree lighting, the hushed boardwalk, the snow coming down soft over the shuttered summer shops. Then the coldest house on Thistle Lane, sealed up for forty years and only just reopened, gives up a body: a sharp-tongued appraiser hired to catalog its dusty contents, found dead behind a door bolted from the inside. Fourteen shutters nailed shut.

Three clean inches of snow at every entrance, unbroken save for the morning crew's own boots. No one could have gotten in. No one could have gotten out.

And yet. The county is ready to call it an accident, and the arithmetic agrees — but Hazel can't stop staring at one small wrong thing in that room, the candy-maker's version of a square cut crooked on the tray. As the snow deepens and the holidays press on, she works a whole cottage of suspects who each owed the dead man something, chasing the impossible question of how a killer walked through a wall of snow and iron.