The Millbrook Mysteries · Book 3
The Ridge Road
A novel, published 2025
The Ridge Road climbs out of Millbrook Crossing, crosses the town line, and comes down again in Hartley Falls. For most of a century that has been all anybody needed to know about it.
In November a hiker finds a car parked at the height of land with a full tank, a cold engine, and a note that is not a note.
The driver is a woman Nora Beckett sat beside at town meeting for nine years without once asking what she did before she moved up here.
The answer turns out to be the sort of thing a person moves to Vermont in order to stop being.
Nora has three days before the first real snow closes the ridge, and everyone she needs to talk to lives on the far side of it.
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From the opening pages
The first few hundred words of The Ridge Road, so you can hear the voice before you buy it.
By the second week of November the Ridge Road belongs to the deer and the town truck, in that order.
Nora drove up in the last of the afternoon with the heater going and the window cracked, because the heater in the library's ancient wagon smelled like scorched dust and she had learned to take the cold instead. At the height of land the road widens into a pull-off where people stop in October to photograph the valley, and where nobody stops at all once the leaves are down.
The car was still there. Somebody had strung a length of orange tape across the pull-off, the kind that means nothing to anyone and stops no one, and it had already come loose at one end and was ticking against the guardrail in the wind.
She got out and stood beside it and did not touch anything.
From up there you could see the whole of Millbrook Crossing laid out below in a bend of the river: the white steeple, the mill, the school, the two hundred roofs of the people she saw every single day of her life. It looked like a place where nothing happens. That was the thing Nora had learned in four years. It always looks like that, right up until it doesn't.
Excerpt from The Ridge Road © 2025 Iris Hale.
Praise for The Ridge Road
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“The best one yet, and I say that having argued with the ending for a week.”
“Reads like somebody who has actually sat through a town meeting in February.”
Start the series again
The Quiet Ledger
A town clerk dies at eighty-one and leaves behind a ledger that balances a little too well.
Read about book 1