Introducing Feathers and Phantoms, The Winifred Baxter Mysteries, Book Three — arriving August 21. 

There is a town on the coast of Maine called Pelican Cove. It is not on any real map, which is a shame, because I would like to live there. It has a harbor that smells of salt and diesel and, in autumn, of woodsmoke. It has a shop called Baxter’s Botanicals and Curiosities, where the tea is medicinal and the shelves hold a little of everything a person might need and a few things nobody has needed in years. And it has a crow. 

I should introduce you properly, since Book Three is a fine place to begin. 

Winifred Baxter is thirty-two, an apothecary by trade, and a skeptic by long and deliberate practice. She keeps a field notebook. She keeps a bowl on the counter for the things she cannot yet explain, against the day the explanations arrive. For three books now the explanations have been slow to come, and Winifred is a patient woman, but even patience has a shelf life. 

Then there is Copernicus. He is a crow. He is not, Winifred will tell you firmly, her familiar. He simply happens to be present. He simply happens to bring her things — a button, a key, a brooch wound through with a thread that matches a dead man’s coat. She would like it very much if you did not read anything into that. She would like it very much if she didn’t have to, either. 

Around the two of them is a cast I have grown genuinely fond of: Arthur Lester, the harbormaster, who has taken to Saturday dinners and to believing Winifred slightly ahead of the evidence; Detective Aldrich over in Rockport, who will come around to a murder but never, ever to a ghost; and Percy Hatch, who knows every story the town has ever told about itself and cannot wait to tell you the worst of them. 

What happens in Feathers and Phantoms

Up on the wooded hill above the harbor stands the old Merrick place, Harrow House, shut for thirty-five years. The town remembers its ghost — the Harrow Hill girl, a governess who died on the tower stair a lifetime ago and has walked the house ever since. When the last of the Merricks comes home to sell the place and dies at the foot of that same stair, the town calls it the phantom. 

And the town’s beloved retired doctor — the warmest, most reasonable man in Pelican Cove — calls it a rotten step, and hysteria, and enough of this ghost nonsense. 

They are both wrong. Winifred knows it. She has seen the girl at the tower window. She has watched her point. 

But a dead woman’s testimony will not stand in any court, and the man who murdered her has spent thirty-five years teaching a whole town not to believe its own eyes. To catch him, Pelican Cove’s own arch-skeptic will have to do the one thing she has never done: trust what she sees — and then find a way to prove it that a policeman can follow on foot. 

It is a fair-play mystery, which is a promise I take seriously. Every clue Winifred sees, you see, at the same moment she does. The murder always has a human solution. The ghost is a witness, not a monster. And this time the haunting isn’t a warning — it’s testimony that has been waiting thirty-five years for someone to look up. 

A word on why I wrote it

I dedicated this book to the people who were told, for years, that what they saw was only a dream. I think most of us have met the most reasonable person in the room, and trusted them precisely because they sounded so much like sense. This is a cozy mystery — sweet, closed-door, the violence kept off the page, a crow with opinions and a town you’d move to tomorrow. But underneath the tea and the autumn leaves, it’s a book about how much damage a calm, kindly, reasonable voice can do when it decides you shouldn’t believe yourself. My first readers told me the doctor was too obviously wicked, so I made him kind. It made him worse. 

Feathers and Phantoms is the third Winifred Baxter mystery, and it reads perfectly well on its own — though if you’d like to start at the beginning, that’s Caws and Effect, then A Murder of Crows. It arrives August 21, and you can find it, and the rest of Pelican Cove, at www.jessieclarkauthor.com. Sign up for the newsletter there and you’ll join the ARC team and read Book Four first — because there is, I’m afraid, a black wing cut into the founding stone of Harrow House, and Winifred has stopped being the kind of woman who leaves a shut door shut. 

Stay suspicious of everyone. It’s just good practice. 🖤 

Jessie Clark