The Donation Box: A Small-Town Library Cozy Mystery, Book 1 (A Fairweather Friends Mystery)

The flap on box four says forty-nine, in Roy Uhrig’s own grease pencil. The table says forty-seven. In most towns that would be a shrug; in Fairweather it is an item for the minutes. And by Sunday, the man who wrote the count — fifty years the county’s auctioneer, exact to the last lot — is dead at the foot of a ladder he paid a boy to climb.The county writes it down as a fall and files it. The Friends of the Fairweather Public Library — a retired teacher who has been chairing things since before anyone can remember voting for her, an archivist whose standing rule is that nothing is true until it is a line in a ledger, a treasurer who reads numbers standing up so they get accepted before they get discussed, and the woman at the Blue Plate counter who hears the whole town think out loud — have a book sale to run, a roof to pay for, and a count that will not come even.What follows is not a manhunt. It is a small town doing what it has always done better than the county: paying attention, in company. The trail runs through the town’s own paper — an accession ledger, a mail schedule, a want list in somebody’s careful hand — and through the things Fairweather gives away free: coffee, casseroles, the benefit of the doubt. One of those, it turns out, has been keeping a private price list for years.Before the sale opens, the Friends will have to decide what the dead are owed, and what the living can stand to hear said out loud in a room with the chairs already set.The county closed its file. The Friends are still counting.THE DONATION BOX is a small-town library cozy mystery — Book 1 of the Fairweather Friends series. The case opens and closes inside this one book, no cliffhanger; what carries on is the company.