THE TWELFTH HOUSE ON GARNET ROW

Winifred Tackett has spent thirty years making fake corpses for Thistlewood’s Halloween competition. She knows every prop on Garnet Row by its armature — by the weight of her materials, the resistance of her wire, the specific finish she mixed that autumn. She built most of what’s on those twelve lawns. After thirty years, she can prove it.

Then she finds the one she didn’t make.

It’s the morning of the judging. The competition’s most photographed graveyard tableau. And the figure in the third row — arms extended, face down, covered in artificial leaves — is Merle Hasty, the Reckoning’s head judge for twenty-two years. He’s been lying in plain sight on the most photographed street in the county for somewhere between eighteen and thirty hours while four hundred people walked past taking pictures of him.

Before Win can count her props and go home, there’s an inventory number that comes out exactly right — which is the most wrong thing she’s ever seen, because if Merle is in the tableau and Merle is not one of hers, then someone moved a piece, placed a body, and put everything back so the count would hold; nine years of competition photographs that the county reporter spreads across her shop counter at seven in the morning without explanation or apology; a cold-process headstone in the third row that someone built by watching how she works without knowing why she stopped using that technique outdoors; and the slow, precise understanding that whoever did this studied her — her armatures, her recovery schedule, her inventory system — and used everything she built to hide the one real thing among two hundred fakes.

She’s spent thirty years as the person who makes everyone else’s event possible, standing outside the frame. He’s spent twenty-two years as the competition’s most important figure, handing back every attempt to hold him accountable without a second glance. What happens next runs entirely on the evidence Win herself created.

A cozy mystery for readers who want their fair-play locked tight and their sleuth’s expertise genuinely load-bearing. The kind of book where you find the clue before she names it and then hold your breath until she does.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Cozy & Comfort sits at 5.8 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with 45–80 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the craft-expertise amateur sleuth is the category’s highest-performing archetype, and this package takes it further than the standard: Win’s expertise isn’t personality, it’s the locked-room device

→ The Halloween cozy slot is dramatically undersupplied — fewer than 1,100 competing titles against a 9.1 sales-to-comp ratio in October, one of the highest cells in the mystery category

→ The series frame outlives the season — Tackett Props supplies Thistlewood’s full civic calendar, so Books 2 (Harvest Pageant) and 3 (county fair) keep the shelf active year-round, not just October

→ Triple-category play — Cozy & Comfort + Amateur Sleuths + Seasonal (Halloween) activates three discovery channels simultaneously; third category requested via KDP backend for October spike

→ “She built every fake corpse on the street — she’s the only one who can spot the real one” is a social-share hook — immediately comprehensible, genuinely distinctive, no context required to land on BookTok or in reader communities

→ Cross-audience reach beyond core cozy readers — clean/sweet romance readers who want a multi-book slow burn with no heat and no HEA pressure convert readily here; the Grady/Win arc is explicitly a series arc, giving that audience something to invest in across three books

TROPES:
• Amateur sleuth with craft expertise
• Body hidden in plain sight
• Small-town competition with long grudges
• Shop as the town’s crossroads
• The inventory that proves everything
• The correct number that’s completely wrong
• Background slow burn 
• Fair-play mystery — all clues in the reader’s hands before the reveal • Community of suspects who all mean well about most things
• Series-opening sleuth

CONTENT INTENSITY: Mild / Cozy — death occurs before the book opens; the body is discovered and described with dignity; no on-page violence, no peril to the protagonist, no graphic content

Perfect for fans of: Jenn McKinlay, Vivien Chien, Laura Childs, and Darci Hannah