Death on Mulberry Lane: A neighbor-from-hell cozy mystery about secrets, surveillance, and the body found one wall away

About Death on Mulberry Lane: A neighbor-from-hell cozy mystery about secrets, surveillance, and the body found one wall away

Death on Mulberry LaneHollow Hearth Mysteries · Book 3A neighbor-from-hell cozy mystery about secrets, surveillance, and the body found one wall awayYou can ignore a strange neighbor. You cannot ignore the smell of smoke coming through your bedroom wall. When the long–empty house next door finally rents, candle maker Mara Linden braces for barking dogs or midnight parties.

Instead she gets Eli North: quiet, polite, a little too curious about Evergreen Hollow’s past and the old story of a girl who vanished on Sleepy Hollow Lane. At first it is normal neighbor weird. Lights at three in the morning.

Boxes carried in only after dark. Cinder, the shop cat, obsessed with the shared wall like something on the other side is humming. Then Mara wakes to sirens and the sour reek of burned plastic.

Eli’s kitchen has gone up in flames. Once the fire is out, the crew finds a man’s body on the floor, and Eli is nowhere. The town decides the story for her.

Eli is dangerous. Eli ran. Eli must be tied to the old case Mara will not let go.

Mara is not so sure. A hidden camera aimed at her shop window, a cache of encrypted files, and a stack of digitized yearbook photos suggest something more complicated. The dead man turns out to be a local handyman who has spent years “fixing” property files and town records for cash.

Someone has been paying him to erase the past one document at a time. As Mulberry Lane fills with hushed conversations and baked apologies, Mara digs through firewall logs, homeowners’ grudges, and a neighborhood barbecue that tells her more than any official interview. Every clue points back to the night on Sleepy Hollow Lane, and to someone who will do anything to keep those old photographs buried.

If Mara is wrong about Eli, she could be sheltering a killer one wall away. If she is right, then the real murderer has been walking past her front window for years.