Three Minutes Slow

October in Hollowmere, Vermont, means Harvest Days, jack-o-lanterns up the cow lane, and a supper and dance at the Grange. This year it also means the restored clock towers rededication. For as long as anyone can remember the tower has run three minutes slow, and the whole town has learned to add the three without thinking. Clockmaker Nell Thorne means to set it true.

Her mother means to come home for it.

Nell hasnt seen Claire since she was twelve. Now Claire steps off the Burlington bus with the hands of a woman who mends ships chronometers and very little to say, and a Boston dealer arrives the same week with one last piece from an old theft and a page of an old ledger to sell. On the night the tower strikes true for the first time, the dealer is found dead in his car behind the Grange, and Claire is the one found at his window.

The state police have a stranger with a motive. The town has a dozen people who can say exactly where everyone else was at three minutes past nine. And Nell has a gift very few people know about: when she winds a clock that has stopped, she hears the last minute before it stopped.

This time she isnt the only one in the family who can.

Three Minutes Slow is the sixth and final book in the Hollowmere Clock Shop Mysteries, a cozy series with a stubborn heroine, a slow-burn sheriff, a one-eared cat with opinions, and clocks that remember everything. It brings the series long mystery home, and like every book in the series it is also a complete mystery on its own.

Complete mystery · No cliffhangers · No gore, no explicit scenes · A slow-burn romance · A town youll want to move to.