The Millbrook Mysteries · Book 1
The Quiet Ledger
A novel, published 2021
When the Millbrook Crossing town clerk dies in her sleep at eighty-one, she leaves behind a tidy house, a tidier ledger, and a locked drawer nobody knew about.
Nora Beckett, who took over the library three weeks earlier and already regrets it, is asked to sort the clerk's papers because nobody else has the patience for them.
The ledger balances. That is the first thing that bothers her.
By the time the sugar maples turn, Nora has learned that a town of nine hundred can keep a secret for forty years, as long as everyone agrees on the same small lie.
Getting them to stop agreeing is the hard part.
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From the opening pages
The first few hundred words of The Quiet Ledger, so you can hear the voice before you buy it.
The clerk's house smelled like paper and cold woodstove, the particular smell of a room nobody has opened a window in since March. Nora set her bag on the kitchen table and looked at the boxes stacked along the wall. Eleven of them, each one labeled in a hand so even it might have been printed.
She had expected chaos. People imagine that a life comes apart the way a room does, all at once and everywhere. What Edith Vance left behind was the opposite: forty-one years of town business sorted by year, by month, by category, tied with the kind of string you cannot buy anymore.
The ledger was in the last box, under the tax rolls, the way you would put something if you wanted it found but not found first.
Nora opened it on the table. Columns. Dates. The looping capitals of a woman who learned penmanship back when penmanship was a subject. Every page balanced. Every page had balanced for four decades, in a town that had never once in Nora's memory agreed on the cost of a snowplow.
She sat down without taking her coat off and turned to March of 1984. Outside the window the light went the flat gray it goes in Vermont at four o'clock, and she read until she could not see the page.
Excerpt from The Quiet Ledger © 2021 Iris Hale.
Praise for The Quiet Ledger
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“Starts quiet and then will not let you put it down. I lost a Sunday to this one.”
“The town is the best character in the book, and it never once shows off.”
Next in the series
What the River Keeps
A spring flood hands back a car that went into the water in 1987, and the town would rather it hadn't.
Read about book 2