Contesting the Wool
About
"I love the characters, and it is a joy to slip back into their world."
-Carstairs Considers
It’s curtains for somebody at the reading of the will…
Polyester Monroe never expected to inherit anything from Reginald Villamere, the recently deceased millionaire who preserved San Ladrón’s historic movie theater. Poly barely knew the man—but her own relatives, who left her the fabric shop, certainly did. So when Villamere’s thirty-year-old will names them among his beneficiaries, Poly is unexpectedly pulled into a mystery steeped in old grudges and buried secrets.
The situation turns deadly when one of Villamere’s lawyers is found murdered in a theater storage room immediately after the will reading. While the town buzzes more about inheritance rumors than the death of a stranger, motives pile up fast.
The historical society is determined to seize control of the theater. A devoted longtime employee is furious at being passed over. Another staff member is hiding a carefully pressed past. And the murdered lawyer may have had secrets of his own—including a hidden connection to an heir no one saw coming.
As suspicion spreads through every corner of the small California town, Poly must rely on her eye for patterns and her talent for unraveling tangled truths. But the closer she comes to mending the gaps in this case, the clearer it becomes: someone is willing to kill to keep the past from taking center stage.
The sixth Material Witness cozy mystery delivers classic cozy intrigue, a colorful cast of suspects, and a fabric-loving sleuth who knows that when secrets are stitched too tightly, they’re bound to tear.
Perfect for fans of inheritance mysteries, small-town secrets, and clever cozies stitched with style.
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Genre: Cozy mystery, Amateur sleuth
Praise for this book
In Vallere’s winsome sixth cozy featuring Southern California fabric store owner Poly Monroe (after Sheer Window), the death of a millionaire begets several mysteries. The tight-knit town of San Ladrón, Calif., is abuzz over the reading of Reginald Villamere’s will, but Poly is surprised to be invited, since she never met the dead man. She assumes she’s just a plus-one for her boyfriend, Vaughn McMichael, the executor of Villamere’s estate, but to her shock, she turns out to be one of Villamere’s beneficiaries, receiving a collection of textiles left over after the renovation of a historic movie theater that Villamere oversaw. When Poly goes to the theater to take stock of the textiles, she finds the bloody corpse of Ben Schaffley, the attorney representing Villamere’s estate, in the storage room. Worried she’s either being targeted by a killer or somebody is killing on her behalf, Poly digs through Villamere’s past in search of plausible suspects. Vallere gives cozy fans everything they could want: a lovable lead, a small-town setting worth escaping into, and a witty resolution to the whodunit. It’s a charmer.