Glass Eyes and Good Intentions

She has run her taxidermy shop alone for fifty years. He has never kept a job for five months. Neither of them is looking for the other.

Agnes Pfeiffer is seventy-four, sharp as a scalpel, and the best taxidermist in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her husband is three years gone. Her fence is down and her back is going, and she would sooner climb the barn roof in the rain than ask anyone for help.

Rob Hollis is nineteen and out of work again. He learns everything fast and stops paying attention the minute he has it. He only turns up at the Pfeiffer farm because of Agnes’s granddaughter, Capril, the quiet girl two pews ahead of him in church.

Agnes hires him to mend a fence. Then to clean the gutters. Then, one morning, she opens the shop door.

Inside are a seven-foot bear named Clarence, a freezer full of other people’s memories, and a boss who calls him “the boy” and counts his mistakes out loud. Rob meets a boy who wants his pet iguana buried in a pinstriped suit, a widow carrying her late husband’s beagle, and a salesman from Philadelphia who would like antlers put on a doe. Slowly he learns what Agnes has always known. The work was never about the animal. It is about the person who walks through the door.

But Capril has not set foot in that shop since she was four years old. Her grandmother keeps one door at the back of it padlocked. And when deer season comes and the whole farm lands on Rob’s shoulders, he finds out what it costs to make one promise too many.

Glass Eyes and Good Intentions is a warm, funny, clean novel about family, honest work, first love, and the people who make us who we are.

You will enjoy this book if you like small towns, old stone farms, and neighbors who know everything; a cranky mentor with a soft heart; fathers and sons, grandmothers and granddaughters; gentle humor and a sweet, slow-burn romance; and clean reading, with no swearing and no explicit scenes.

Book One of The Taxidermist’s Apprentice series. Rob’s first year on the farm is a complete story. The family secret behind the locked door carries on into Book Two.