The Kiln Book

Every potter's kiln book records what came out of the fire. This one records what went into a wall.

When the almshouses at St. Petroc's reopen, celebrated ceramicist Margot Bewes has been commissioned to set twenty-four commemorative tiles into the courtyard wall — one name to a tile, incised in her own hand, for the women who lived and died there. The morning after the ceremony she is found dead in the community room. No EpiPen, no witnesses, and an inquest already leaning toward accident. She was sixty-three. She was tired. These things happen.

Cecily Mallory knows better. Helping with the clear-up, the rare-book dealer lifts Margot's clay-dusted apron with bare hands and gets something cold, directed and very recent — not grief, not an accident, but a decision taken close by. The apron had been folded over the back of a chair. Margot did not fold things.

The town has its answer ready before Cecily does. Those twenty-four names come out of Rowena Chalke's new history of the almshouse women, and one of them stands beside the initial of a Victorian matron whose great-great-grandson is the trust's lead trustee today. Everyone in Bellhaven can see who wanted those names off that wall. Everyone, Cecily included.

But an echo isn't evidence. The truth is sitting in a fat, clay-crusted notebook that nobody has thought to open — forty years of firing schedules, glaze recipes and job notes, and in the back, a page of penciled numbers. Twenty-four fixing depths, measured by a woman who was exacting about everything.

Eleven of them are wrong.

The Kiln Book is the sixth Margin Note Mystery: a cozy, atmospheric whodunit with a paranormal twist — old books, buried history, a clever amateur sleuth, and a cat with secrets of his own.