A Bitter Cup to Swallow: Some locks punish the wrong hands on purpose. (The Crestwick Chronicles Book 2)

Harriet Godwin has been the Keeper of Crestwick for forty-one days. Nobody handed her a title, a key, or a single useful instruction — only a dead man’s records and a growing suspicion that the job is mostly made of things she is already too late for.
Then the first snow comes, and with it a woman from two towns over who thinks Harriet is a liability. And that same afternoon, in a freezing county basement, a retired clerk named Owen Ledbetter is found dead with both hands locked around a ledger.
Everyone else sees a seizure in a cold room. Harriet tastes copper and knows better. Stitched into that ledger’s spine is an iron ring made in 1878 — a lock that cannot be forced, read, or cut by the wrong hands, and that punishes not the person who forces it but the nearest member of the family who built it.
It is still armed. It is now in a sheriff’s evidence room. And on Friday, a deputy is going to open it.
To stop it, Harriet will have to teach a frightened librarian what she is, make terms with a Keeper who wants everything burned, and lie by omission to the one man who has never once caught her in a lie — while somewhere in Crestwick, a decent woman with a burned hand is waiting for the courage to knock.
Some truths set you free. This one comes in a cup nobody wants to drink.
A fair-play cozy mystery with practical old magic, a slow-burn romance, and a cat who has never once been wrong.