Rose's Ring

Every librarian finds things in returned books. Margaret Hale is the one who gives them back. On a rainy Monday in Millbrook, Pennsylvania, Margaret fishes a waterlogged copy of Great Expectations out of the library book drop. Tucked inside is a pawn ticket from 1987. Someone has written one word on it in pencil: Ring.

The ticket leads her to Walter Novak, eighty-four, a retired steelworker who pawned his wife Rose's wedding ring the spring the mill closed. He went back for it with the money in an envelope and was told it was gone. Rose has been dead twelve years. Walter never told her, and he has never told anyone else.

Margaret can't leave it alone. With help from Frank Dombrowski, a retired detective who swears he only comes in for the newspaper, Susie Shah, a teenage volunteer who can find anybody online, and Bea Kowalski, who runs the diner across the street and already knows everything, she goes looking for the ring. The trail runs through a dead pawnbroker's ledgers, a garage that belongs to a very large raccoon, and a family that has fought over Rose's ring for longer than Walter has kept his secret.

What she finds in those ledgers changes everything Walter believed about that spring. And waiting in Margaret's own desk drawer is an unsigned letter that may be the start of a mystery much closer to home.

Rose's Ring is the first book in The Lost and Found Library Mysteries, a gentle small town series about the things people leave behind and the neighbors who help bring them home. No murders. Plenty of pie.