This is a stand-alone novel featuring Olivia Mercier, a reporter for the local newspaper in a small town in the Sierra Nevadas, near Donner Lake. She’s one of the many people who returned to the town after university, preferring its pace to the noise and congestion of cities like Los Angeles.

Olivia will tell you her home town is the perfect place for a woman to follow Calamity Jane’s directive “If a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one.”

When Shauna Flannery, a dazzling local legend is killed, townspeople are shocked. It’s a seemingly random murder and puts the town on edge. Unfortunately for Olivia, the police soon make discoveries that put her at the top of their suspect list. Olivia launches an investigation, desperately working to find the killer before the police show up on her doorstep with an arrest warrant .

Failure to find the killer means Olivia will become another local legend: the first woman in the town to be convicted of murder. She suspects Calamity Jane would say “Even legends prefer fine dining to prison food, so get with it and save your butt.”

This novel (which was shortlisted for the Crime Writers of Canada’s Award of Excellence for unpublished manuscripts) is being revised and re-polished. If you sign up for my newsletter (there’s a link at the bottom of the page) you will receive updates about this novel.

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