The Devil's Throat Files/A Utah Shadows Thriller Bonus Material

A reader bonus for The Black Wing Secret, Book Four in the Winifred Baxter Mysteries.

The Last Kind Thing is a bonus scene told from Augusta Praxton’s point of view. It explores the choices and secrets behind the novel.

Major spoilers: read The Black Wing Secret before reading this scene.

The novel releases November 27, 2026. Bonus download details will be added here for release day.

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

Condolences

A Jessie Clark bonus story

***

I brought the casserole because that is what you do. When your sister dies on a Tuesday and the whole town decides it was an accident, you show up at her husband's door on Thursday with a nine-by-thirteen dish of chicken and rice, still warm, and you let him see your face doing the thing faces do.

Daniel opened the door in the same flannel he'd worn to identify her. He looked terrible, which was correct. He looked,...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The First Pot
A Crestwick Chronicles bonus scene — two years before Something Wicked This Way Brews

I came to Crestwick on a Tuesday in March with two suitcases, a box of jars wrapped in newspaper, and the firm intention of leaving again by summer.
That is the part nobody believes now, so I may as well put it down while it’s still true in my own memory. I did not come home. I told myself I had come to a town, a particular small town on the wrong side of a...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

THE NINETY-FIRST NAME
### A Crestwick Chronicles bonus scene
by Jessie Clark
Set in January, between A Bitter Cup to Swallow and Steeped in Secrets.
*
Her name is Marguerite Sowerby and she is on page three hundred and eighty-four, and the entry says school — 1998 and nothing else at all.
I had put her off for six weeks. I want to be honest about that, because I had told myself it was scheduling and it was not. I had a list of a hundred and nine people, and I...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

THE VANISHING PROTOCOL
FREE READER BONUS

What the Friction Is For

A Bonus Scene
by Jessie Clark

Three weeks after the events at the Hub Core.
The cabin. The deck. After everyone else has gone to sleep.
The question Maya has been sitting on since Bleecker Street.

jessieclarkauthor.com

A Note from Jessie

You're here. Thank you.
The scene you're about to read is one I wrote before the final chapter was done. I knew it existed — knew there was a conversation on the deck...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The Sixth Copy

A bonus scene from The Candor Exception — Jessie Clark

June Whitlock, four days before the register changed.

***

June Whitlock got to the office at six twenty, which was ninety minutes early, and she did not turn on the main lights.

She had a reason for that and was not going to give it to anybody.

Hannah Boaz had found the line in the Delaware filing at four the previous afternoon. The room had done what rooms do. The noise. The phone calls. Maya...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The First Name in the New File
An Ellie Calder story

The ranger station smelled the same at nine at night as it always had, which was the first thing I noticed and the thing I kept noticing, week after week, like my body expected the building to have changed along with everything else. Compressor on the mini-fridge, kicking on and off like something breathing in another room. Sandstone going from red to purple to the flat gray-black it turned every night...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The Last Kind Thing
A Black Wing Secret bonus scene — Augusta Praxton's POV
The Trust office was cold enough by eight that I kept my coat on to finish the last of the month's letters, which was its own kind of penance, since I could have gone home an hour before and let tomorrow have them instead. I have never been a woman who lets tomorrow have anything. My father used to say it fondly, the way you'd praise a dog for a trick it couldn't help doing, and my...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

First Draft ### A Silent Inheritance bonus scene — Corinne Roussel POV

The notebook was new. That was the first thing Corinne noticed about it, sitting down at her own kitchen table for the first time in longer than she wanted to count — not the black hardbound kind she'd carried into eleven sessions with a recorder angled toward someone else's window, but a plain one, spiral-bound, the cheapest kind sold at the pharmacy two doors down from the apartment...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The Last Entry A Vale & Ward Files bonus scene · Warren Kessler's POV · ~1,500 words Set the night of Wesley Croft's visit, eleven days before Warren Kessler's death.

***

Warren Kessler waited until the man in the good coat had been gone a full twenty minutes before he let himself sit back down.

He didn't trust himself to move steadily before then. His hands had the same fine tremor they got before a cardiology appointment, the kind the nurses never...

By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

The Nine A.M. Habit

A Synthetic Truth bonus scene — Priya Anand's POV

Priya Anand's badge scanned green at eight fifty-one, and the sound it made was exactly the sound it had always made, and she still flinched.

She'd told herself she wouldn't. She'd rehearsed the walk from the parking garage three separate times in her head the night before, the way she used to rehearse a difficult finding before she presented it to a bank's board. Elevator. Ninth floor....

The Bored Man with the Clipboard

A Silent Mandate companion scene · Niamh · the night before the founding

Niamh went in at 19:40 as a man delivering folding chairs, and the trick, as always, was that she was actually delivering folding chairs.

That was the part the clever ones never understood. Matt would have built a legend, a false manifest, a story with seams. Emily would have read the guard and found the thing he wanted to hear. Niamh did neither. She had spent the afternoon on a real...

The First Honest Morning

A Vale & Ward Files bonus scene · Jessie Clark

Set the week after The Honest Man. Ethan Ward’s point of view. ~1,550 words. Newsletter reader magnet.

Ward woke before her, which almost never happened, and lay still so he wouldn’t wake her, which never happened at all.

The snow had finally stopped sometime in the night. He could tell without opening the blinds; the light coming through them had changed from the flat gray churn of a storm to the clean hard white of a...

Bonus Scene: The Eleventh Door

The facility did not appear on any map, which was how Aether knew it was real.

She had learned to read the absence of things. A road that ended at a gate and then resumed two miles later, as if the land between had been edited out. A power draw on the regional grid that did not match any listed tenant. A water bill paid by a shell company that paid for nothing else. The program had taught Cass to structure memory the way writers structured plots, and Aether had...

The Cold Coffee

A Vale & Ward Files bonus scene · Jessie Clark

Set during the week after The Cold Hour. Ethan Ward’s point of view. ~1,450 words. Newsletter reader magnet.

Ward had made her a promise about a week, and he was three days into keeping it and learning, the way he learned everything about Cass, slowly and by watching, that the hardest part of giving a woman like her a week was that she did not know how to receive one.

The town was called Harnett, four hours north, where the...

A Quiet Evening at The Loose Leaf

A Crestwick Chronicles bonus chapter — a few weeks after Something Wicked This Way Brews

The town decided I was a heroine, which was worse than being a suspect.

When they thought I’d done it, at least they left me alone. People crossed the street. The bell over my door stayed quiet for whole afternoons, and I got a great deal of inventory done. But the moment the truth came out — the moment Crestwick understood that I had been the one to see what no one else...

Editorial Note
The following pages were recovered from Natalie Jones's field notebook, motel stationery, phone transcripts, and loose case cards. They cover the weeks before the events of Canyon Ghosts, when Natalie followed a pattern of missing hikers into the red rock country around Redrock Falls.
Some names and locations appear more than once because Natalie was still cross-checking conflicting reports. She did not yet know which details were mistakes, which were lies, and which ones had...