Updates

As an independent imprint, we don’t have a publicity department or a marketing budget. Mostly we have readers, and the people who write about books for the love of it. So we’re always delighted, and a little thrilled, when someone takes notice of our work. Two recent mentions made our month.

At dru’s book musings, Dru hosted a “A Day in My Life” feature with Nora Fielding, the architectural historian at the center of The White Lady of Balgay. It’s a short first-person visit with Nora in Dundee, and it was a real pleasure to see her step off the page. Read it on dru’s book musings.

At StoreyBook Reviews, The Parliament of Crows got a thoughtful review. They called it “such an interesting take on a mystery,” a cozy that feels a little darker because of the secrets Castres has kept for centuries, and gave it 3½ paws up. They also wrote honestly about what didn’t work as well for them, and we value that just as much. Read the full review on StoreyBook Reviews.

Thank you both for spending time in our towns.

If you’ve read a Good Neighbors Mystery and have something to say about it, we’d love for you to share it. That could be a blog post, a review at your ebook store, a note on social media, or just a recommendation to a friend who likes a good mystery. Word of mouth is how small books find their readers. And if you write about one, let us know at smithandword [at] gmail.com so we can say thanks.

Browse the Good Neighbors Mysteries

Part of the process of creating a Good Neighbors Mystery is the development of the storyline in the chosen location. Often we develop several possible ideas, then winnow it down to the one we end up actually using. But during the development of our August release, which takes place in Madison, Wisconsin, we liked our final set of concepts so much that we decided to do something a bit different – instead of one full novel The Madison Three contains three novellas, all taking place at about the same time in the same place; Madison, Wisconsin.

Each of the novellas is stand-alone and they can be read out of order. But, because they take place in the same location, at around the same time, the novellas do overlap a bit. We enjoyed the unique challenges this represented, as we’ve not done this with any previous Good Neighbors Mystery, and we hope readers enjoy the outcome as much as we enjoyed creating them.

And in another first, The Madison Three features our first male protagonist. After 14 Good Neighbors Mysteries with a female lead character, The Madison Three includes our first leading man.

In What Came Back to the Prairie, ecologist Frankie Lindqvist finds a beloved colleague dead the morning after the autumn burn – the keeper of the Arboretum’s records, struck down with her life’s work stolen from her arms. The easy answer is a fall in the dark. But the missing papers point somewhere Frankie doesn’t want to look: toward the founding of the prairie itself, and one of its most revered names.

In The First-Ice Watch, the old man who spent his life recording Lake Mendota’s freezes is found dead by his pier, and the town is content to call it a bad heart on a cold night. Cora Vandehei knows better. She knows who killed him – and she cannot prove it, or even say it aloud, without unraveling a thirty-year-old secret that protecting the wrong person will cost a family everything.

In The Keepers of Foolishness, a rigid city attorney turns up dead on the frozen lake, and the obvious suspect is the cheerful oddball whose winter stunt drew him out onto the ice. Augie Toscano has four days, one increasingly nosy detective, and a very good reason to solve this himself before the whole city gathers on that same lake and the truth comes up with them.

Find The Madison Three at your favorite ebook provider – we hope you enjoy it.

Keeping with our pace of new Good Neighbor Mysteries each month, over the past several weeks we’ve released four more novels.

At the start of June we released In Confidence, taking place in London, UK, and The New Yorker’s Last Room, taking place in Miami Beach, Florida.

Then in early July we released El Apartado, taking place in Oaxaca, Mexico, and The Unbranded, taking place in Waimea, Hawai’i.

In Confidence

When a retired probation officer is found dead by the river, mediator Harriet Ashdown is drawn into the quiet world of a small City of London society that has met weekly in a room beneath an old pub since the 1880s — and into a question about silence that one of its members cannot live with.

The New Yorker’s Last Room

Val Serra has spent her life salvaging the small beautiful pieces of Miami Beach that the city keeps trying to throw away. When her oldest friend Arnau is found dead in his apartment, the police call it a burglary. Val knows better. What he left behind is asking her to protect it — and she is going to have to learn how.

El Apartado

When a federal cartographer is found dead on a Sierra Norte trail above Oaxaca, the state calls it an accident. Health-policy consultant Adela Vargas Quintero — seven months into a sabbatical she has not yet started — knows better. The closer she gets to the truth, the more she understands that some of what she finds belongs to the mountain, and was never hers to bring down.

The Unbranded

When the gentlest old cattleman in Waimea is found dead in a pit on the range and called a fall, vet Keala Vierra knows better. Her questions lead up the mountain — to an unbranded herd her family has kept for two hundred years, and a truth about who counts as family that runs straight through her own. A Good Neighbors Mystery set in upcountry Hawaiʻi.

Check out the Good Neighbors Mysteries page for links, to more information and purchase at your favorite ebook store.

Our intention all along was to bring more Good Neighbors Mysteries out. For the next few months we expect to be releasing two new Good Neighbors Mysteries a month. Available now (as of May 1) are the following new novels:

The Long Gray Silence takes place in Highland Falls, New York, the town just outside of the US Military Academy of West Point.

Sylvie Moran settles the affairs of the dead in Highland Falls, New York — every file closed, every loose end resolved. When a young researcher dies under suspicious circumstances while investigating a long-dead West Point professor, Sylvie discovers that her neatly closed file was built on a foundation she never examined. A cozy mystery about the weight of silence and the cost of holding on.

The Deep Visitor takes place in Ishigaki, Japan, on the southern edge of the Japanese chain of islands that include Okinawa.

A marine photographer takes an assignment on the Japanese island her mother fled decades ago. When a biologist turns up dead on the reef, Lena is drawn into a community whose bond with the sea runs deeper than anyone admits — and a truth that connects a father’s desperate love to her own family’s silence.

Check out the Good Neighbors Mysteries page for links, to more information and purchase at your favorite ebook store.

We’re delighted to share that the first eight books in the Good Neighbors Mysteries series are now available as ebooks.

At Smith & Word, we aim to create curious books for curious readers, and this series is a clear expressions of that idea. The Good Neighbors Mysteries are cozy mysteries set in real towns, where familiar streets, local landmarks, and everyday lives hide more than first meets the eye. Each book draws on the character and history of an actual place while unraveling a mystery rooted in what makes that town unique. The result, we hope, is something gentle in tone, rich in setting, and just a little uncanny.

The series grew out of a long-standing love of books about real places. Some are travel guides. Some are local histories. Some simply capture a town so vividly that reading becomes its own kind of visit. There is a special pleasure in that sort of book. If you’ve been to the place, each page can bring back its streets, weather, textures, and moods. If you haven’t, it can feel like traveling there from the comfort of your favorite chair.

As we experimented with writing fiction set in real towns, we realized those places made wonderful settings for murder mysteries. A mystery gives readers a reason to move through a place, to notice its landmarks, rhythms, and histories, and to spend time with the people who call it home.

That might already have been enough for a satisfying series. But we decided to take the idea one step further.

Each Good Neighbors Mystery also contains a hidden layer, a secret woven into the life of the town itself. That secret is not the point of the story so much as a truth that complicates the mystery and casts the familiar in a different light. We won’t say more than that here. Part of the pleasure is in discovering each town’s particular strangeness for yourself.

The first eight books are:

• Empty Graves — Redmond, Washington (novella)
• What Grows Beneath — Gilbert, Arizona (novella)
• The Boy at Donkey Creek — Gig Harbor, Washington
• The Changeling’s Garden — Rostock, Germany
• The Parliament of Crows — Castres, France
• The Threshold Guardians — Sausalito, California
• The White Lady of Balgay — Dundee, Scotland
• What the Stone Remembers — Marble Falls, Texas

As the series developed, we also experimented with length. Over time, we came to appreciate the value of giving each town time to come alive, each cast time to settle in, and each mystery time to unfold fairly and satisfyingly. Two of the books, Empty Graves and What Grows Beneath, remain shorter and are being offered as novellas. We’ll be interested to hear which lengths readers prefer.

We’ve loved building these books, and we hope readers will enjoy exploring them. Browse the Good Neighbors Mysteries for more information and purchase links.

And one small favor, if you do pick one up: reviews matter. A great many books arrive on ebook shelves every week, and reader word of mouth makes a real difference. If you enjoy one of the books, we’d be grateful if you left a review at your preferred ebook store. And if something didn’t work for you, we’d still love to hear that too. Thoughtful reader feedback helps us make the next books better.

We’re glad to have you with us as these towns begin to open their doors.