CLUELESS: A Literary Crime Novel of Ashford Hollow — Where the Dead Stay Buried Only If Town Agrees

In a Welsh hill-country village of two thousand people, everyone knows everyone - and everyone is hiding something. Thirty-one years ago, Caleb Whitfield drowned in the river below Hollow Bridge. The inquest said accidental. The town said tragic. The brass plate on his grave says The river took him gently. The only person who knew what actually happened that night was nineteen years old, three hundred yards away in a stone bell tower, and made a decision that took thirty years to undo. Margaret Vance has run the general store on the main street of Ashford Hollow for three decades. She is the first to offer help and the last to leave a sickbed. She presses chamomile on anyone who needs it. The town moves around her warmly, trustingly, and without the shadow of a question. Detective Julian Ashworth-Voss arrives for a different case entirely. He has no reason to open a thirty-year-old file marked accidental. The file has every reason to be opened. A fair-play mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie - all the clues are there. The town saw them. The town chose something else.