The Rooted Mysteries

A house she never wanted. A mystery she can't leave behind.Claire Bennett has ninety seconds of feeling grateful before she reads the condition.Her grandmother left her a farmhouse on twenty-eight acres in the Texas Hill Country sagging porch, sixty-year-old wiring, one bathroom, and a rooster nobody warned her about. Claire assembles land for developers in Austin. She can fix a house like this and sell it by August without ever learning her neighbors' names.Except the will says she has to live in it for six months first.Then a contractor opens the chimney and finds a wooden box that somebody sealed into the stone on purpose. Inside: a Bible, a photograph with one person cut out of it, and sixty-one letters written in 1954 by a woman named Evelyn Draper.Juniper Ridge has one story about Evelyn, and the whole county tells it the same way. She ran off. Left a husband and a three-year-old daughter and never looked back.The letters say otherwise. And the last one, seven lines on a torn half sheet, says this:If anything happens to me, don't believe what they tell you.Claire starts pulling records the way she has for nine years chain of title, county deeds, church registers. What she finds is worse than a scandal. It's a form. Two men walked into a courthouse in the middle of a business day, filled out paperwork that was entirely legal in 1954, and paid a two-dollar filing fee. Everything after that was just Tuesday.But the deeper Claire digs, the closer the trail comes to her own grandmother and to a daughter, now seventy-five, who has spent a lifetime believing her mother didn't want her.With a neighbor who won't tell her what she wants to hear, a town that would rather not be corrected, and a clock running out on the only reason she's still there, Claire has to decide what a truth is worth when telling it will cost people she has come to love.A warm, faith-filled mystery about family secrets, buried records, and what it costs to tell the truth seventy-one years late. Perfect for readers of Christian romantic suspense, small-town women's fiction, and clean cozy mysteries.The House on Juniper Ridge is Book One of The Rooted Mysteries.