Murder, Mining, and Other Reasons for Holes in the Ground: A Cozy Gilded Age Mystery of Love and Murder
Marisa Paxon
Agnes Fairchild arrives in a booming Colorado mining town to teach manners to rich people who acquired money faster than breeding, only to find a mauve-silk boarding-house queen, a bishop’s reception, a room full of seating charts, and one exquisitely ill-timed corpse. I had barely got her settled among the velvet curtains and moral confusion before Mrs. Lavinia Voss was found dead beside a badly fitted gas grate, and suddenly Agnes is sorting through blackmail, family bargains, hidden papers, and the deeply American habit of treating daughters like negotiable assets. Also there is Silas Mercer, a lean local attorney with the bedside manner of a subpoena and the inconvenient decency to keep being useful.
What follows is a historical cozy-adjacent murder mystery in a glittering frontier boomtown, all sharp banter, social warfare, suspicious envelopes, and clues that actually matter. I had to keep track of transoms, soot, missing notes, midnight visitors, and a heroine who begins by judging the West and ends by investigating it with unnerving competence. If Agnes fails, an intelligent dead woman is dismissed as an accident, a young woman is bartered into respectability, and half the town gets to go on calling greed good sense, which I assure you was not a prospect I enjoyed narrating.
If you like fish-out-of-water heroines, dry British wit, clue-rich mysteries, and slow-burn attraction between competent adults under obscene social pressure, this is plainly your sort of trouble. Yes, it is a fully complete stand-alone entry point in the Ghostly Grievances Society world; no, you do not need another book first; yes, the violence is non-gory; and yes, I noticed you worrying about that.
You may also relax on the romantic a closed-door slow-burn romance with a genuine HEA, paired with a satisfying logical mystery reveal. So go on, click Look Inside and let me drag you into Silver Bluff properly; I carried the whole affair once already, I may as well make it worth your evening.
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