The Avelrow shelf
These books match the feeling and story ingredients you chose. Adjust the mix whenever you like.
Genealogical Mystery
Maeve Doyle
The first thing Nora Ashe saved from the fire was not the photograph, though later everyone would assume it was. They would imagine her standing in the smoke with the archive box clutched to her ribs, heroic and tragic in the way people preferred women to be when they were useful after disaster. They would picture flames licking up the old municipal curtains, the brass plaque of the Ballybrack Community Memory Project glowing hot beside the door, Nora choosing the faces of the dead over her own lungs.
Mystery
Aileen Muir
The hours before the ceremony had given no warning except the kind people ignore because ordinary life is noisy. Finn had woken to Nell singing to her cereal. His mother had coughed in the hallway and told everyone she was fine in a voice that meant she was absolutely not. His father had burned toast, scraped it, burned the scraped toast, and finally served everyone Weetabix with the solemnity of a man making legal reparations.
Psychological Thriller
Clara Vey
At eight forty-three on Thursday morning, Sive Moran repainted the white line around a parking space reserved for a woman who had not visited the prison in fourteen months. Nobody had asked her to. That was important. If somebody had asked, there would have been a form.
Medical-Legal Thriller
E. L. Doherty
The sea had a way of pretending it was innocent. From the lane above the cliffs it looked almost gentle — slate-grey, flecked with pale foam, breathing in and out like something asleep. The wind did the loud work, flinging rain sideways, rattling the gorse, making a song of the wire fences. Down below, the tide kept its own counsel. Nora Fallon walked that path with her coat pulled tight and her hair half loose, as if she’d forgotten she was meant to be careful.
Cozy Mystery
Orla Ashdown
The first scone to cause a death in Emerald Harbour was not, strictly speaking, poisoned. Molly Fenn would later be very firm on that point, because a woman might survive gossip, debt, heartbreak, and one catastrophic fringe cut, but she could not survive a village deciding her almond-and-blackcurrant scones were murder weapons. The scone was innocent. The man beside it was another matter entirely.