Iced Out

When a body surfaces at Wellington Lake’s 62nd annual Ice Fishing Derby, preserved in the eastern shore ice like evidence waiting to be found, it turns what should be Ridgeway Springs’ most beloved winter tradition into a town-wide reckoning. The victim is George Marsh, a hardware store owner whose controversial lakeside development proposal had already divided the selectboard. But what looks like a dispute over property lines is only the surface.

Eloise Stevens has spent two years transforming the Ridgeway Springs Inn into the community’s operational heart, and its archive into something no one expected: a record of every secret the town ever tried to bury quietly. When the threads of Marsh’s death lead straight back through decades of civic records, Eloise recognizes the pattern. She’s been assembling this particular puzzle, without knowing it, since her very first autumn in Vermont.

The case will demand everything Eloise has including her archivist’s eye for the document that shouldn’t exist, her innkeeper’s ear for what the neighbors aren’t saying, and her willingness to follow a thirty-year trail to its uncomfortable end.

Some things, it turns out, are better preserved in ice than forgotten entirely.