The Old Fashioned Society

Cozy Mystery · Clean / closed door · 26 chapters + epilogue · 1st person

Complete planning package, 174 pages: the premise, a full codex, every chapter outlined, an AI prompt for every chapter, and the whole launch kit — listing, blurb, keywords, posts, newsletter, reader magnet — already written. One buyer only. When it’s claimed, it’s gone.

Gail Lindahl spent thirty-eight years as a court stenographer getting the words exactly right. She can replay any conversation she's been part of as if she'd recorded it — a useful skill in a courtroom, and a different kind of useful altogether when you've spent six years meeting every Friday with three people you trust, picking apart a 1997 cold case over brandy old fashioneds.

Then Cyril Batiste — retired funeral director, group patriarch, the one who always brought mints — tells the Old Fashioned Society he's finally figured out who set the boathouse fire. He collapses before he can say who.

Before Gail can reconstruct the transcript, there's the county ruling it cardiac without asking the right questions, Priscilla Dunmore doing something with a bitters container that no retired chemistry teacher should be able to do, a twenty-nine-year-old insurance file with Augie's name on it in a place he's never explained, a bartender who has worked the Loon's Landing for twenty-one years and stopped making eye contact the morning Cyril died, and the gap in Gail's own Friday notes — what Cyril started to say, and what he said instead.

Gail has spent thirty-eight years building a life on getting the words exactly right; she has never once gotten the silence wrong — until the Friday she was watching the wrong person. The man who killed Cyril has been building an identity on making people feel safe, and he has been doing it for twenty-nine years.

A warm Wisconsin cozy mystery where the cold case and the fresh murder turn out to be the same case — and the answer was at the table all along. The kind of book you read under a blanket with a brandy old fashioned, then text your best friend about at midnight because you need someone else to be devastated that Cyril is gone.

WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ dual-category positioning; full Suspense Architecture (clue ledger with solve point, red herring map, dramatic irony map, hidden timeline, fair-play audit); competitive analysis against three comp titles

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with Gail Lindahl and five suspects, supporting cast of 6, Loon's Landing Supper Club on Lake Wendaga with the corner booth at the center of everything; three-weeks-of-Fridays timeline, first-person voice system with four example passages, and series seeds for 2 additional books

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 26 chapters + epilogue; action beats, emotional beats, key dialogue, and sensory details; clue-plant and concealment notes per chapter; ending hooks and word-count targets throughout

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — one fully self-contained prompt per chapter, five Society Minutes interstitials, and the epilogue; complete character context, voice guidance, and clue-planting instructions embedded in every prompt

⭐️ Amazon Launch Kit — the listing, written: Amazon listing with categories and keywords, back cover copy, 50-word short description, and two Ideogram cover prompts with settings lines

⭐️ Reader & Promo Kit — Instagram and Facebook posts, newsletter announcement with three subject lines, and reader targeting

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table; five data-backed positioning bullets; 7-keyword strategy table with rationale; full launch positioning including category recommendations, pricing strategy, and cover direction

You write the book. The listing, the blurb, the keywords, the posts, the newsletter and the reader magnet are already written.

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ MTS > Mystery > Cozy sits at 2.1 sales-to-comp (Beaten Track Mainstream) with 152 estimated daily sales per top 20 title and a #1 bestseller earning 894 daily sales — proven demand at massive scale, with sustained upward momentum since April 2025

→ Dual-category play with MTS > Mystery > Amateur Sleuth (2.8 sales-to-comp, Beaten Track Mainstream, 112 daily sales per top 20) — an ensemble of career experts qualifies for both lanes simultaneously without forcing the category fit

→ Market-Matched™ research places the murder-club trope at competition index 92/100, generating an estimated $42,000/month across just 2% of category titles — the strongest opportunity-to-competition ratio in the ensemble cozy subgenre

→ Cold case + fresh murder running as a single structural engine is the highest-performing cozy mystery plot architecture in the current market — the dual-mystery pressure drives the "couldn't stop reading" reviews that move series read-through

→ Wisconsin supper club setting occupies a specific cultural pocket that generic small-town cozy entries cannot claim — regionally vivid, nationally readable, and directly shareable to the Thursday Murder Club reader base actively looking for its American equivalent

TROPES:
• Murder Club
• Cold Case Meets Fresh Murder
• The Cold Case and the Fresh Murder Are the Same Case
• Ensemble of Expert Amateurs
• Poison Hidden in Plain Sight
• The Career Is the Superpower (Gail's verbatim recall / Augie's fraud eye / Prissy's chemistry)
• The Memory That Holds the Answer
• What He Didn't Say Was the Clue
• Reluctant Young Official Who Comes Around
• The Killer Has Been Serving Their Drinks This Whole Time
• Found Family in the Last Third of Life
• Fair-Play Whodunit (the solution was always on the page)

HEAT LEVEL:
Sweet / Clean — no violence on page, no romance required; the intimacy is friendship, grief, and what it means to keep showing up for each other in the last third of life

Perfect for fans of: Richard Osman, Louise Penny, M.C. Beaton, and Ann Cleeves

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