A featured selection at the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books

Secrets can — and will — kill.

Mired in the fallout from allowing a murderer to elude justice, the last thing Windeport Police Chief Sean Colbeth needs is another suspicious death in the small village. He gets one all the same when the bespectacled proprietor of Route One Hobbies, Walter Guernsey, is found dead a few days after the Fourth of July holiday. Known throughout the county for aisles well-stocked with eclectic materials supporting just about any special interest, the store’s signature feature is an intricately detailed model railroad layout representing Windeport in miniature. Many paused on the sidewalk outside the store to watch Walter work on the layout begun by his grandfather — right up until he becomes part of the diorama himself, victim of a freak electrical accident.

Sean is inclined to blame the death on an extraordinary stroke of bad luck but reconsiders when tantalizing evidence surfaces that Guernsey had been protecting a decades-old family secret, one that had been weighing heavily on him in the weeks leading up to his death. Digging through the old brownstone housing the hobby store only deepens the mystery, for clearly whatever Guernsey was holding onto had the potential to reshape Windeport itself — a very potent motive, perhaps, for more than a few notable village residents to keep Guernsey quiet. Permanently.

Faced with a murder and a vengeful enemy willing to weaponize it in their crusade to take down the Police Chief, Sean finds his faith in the very institutions he’s sworn to uphold begin to unravel when he starts to wonder if some secrets deserve to remain buried…