The Vanishing Key

A Gripping Cozy Mystery · A Mysteries Left Ajar Prequel

Retired travel planner Etta Bellamy came to Boulder for a fresh start — not a crime scene.

The Victorian she's rented at the edge of Pearl Street is waiting with its front door ajar. Inside, her landlord lies collapsed by the fireplace, and a single unmarked key rests on the mantel. By the time the ambulance pulls away, the key is gone — taken from a room where only Etta and a detective had been standing.

With her golden retriever Biscuit, a sharp-eyed librarian, and the town's warmest café owner beside her, Etta starts pulling threads: letters written sixty years ago to a woman named Cecelia Hargrove, each one politely warning her to stop asking questions. A concealed compartment behind the mantel. A tenant who vanished from this same house three weeks before Etta arrived.

Now someone else wants what Cecelia hid — someone whose name is on half of Pearl Street, and who stands to lose everything if a hundred-year-old lie is finally read out loud.

Etta has to find what Cecelia buried before the man hunting it decides she's one more loose end.