Coming this Fall: “Cozy, Christian Mystery” series.
Nothing ever happens in Steadfast, Kansas. Until they lower the bell.
For fifty years, Maggie Keller has been the pastor’s wife — the woman who pours the coffee, remembers every name, and notices everything nobody else does. Now that her husband Ben is Pastor Emeritus, the whole town assumes the Kellers have settled into a quiet retirement of cinnamon rolls and hymn sings.
Then Zion Lutheran takes down its 1887 bell for restoration, and workers find two words scratched inside the crown — and a body sealed behind the tower wall.
Walter Brandt, the church treasurer who supposedly ran off with the building fund in 1963, never left at all. And the son who spent sixty years wearing his father’s shame is suddenly Sheriff Baxter’s favorite suspect.
Maggie promised Earl she wouldn’t investigate. She honestly wasn’t planning to. But somebody in Steadfast has been guarding a lie since before the interstate came through, and Ben’s gentle insistence that “surely there must be a charitable explanation” isn’t going to clear an innocent man’s name.
Armed with a casserole rotation, a memory like a county courthouse, and a husband who’s buried every secret in three counties without ever telling one, Maggie starts asking questions. Politely. While dropping something off.
The trouble with ringing a bell is that everyone hears it — including the one person who’ll climb sixty feet in the dark to keep the past exactly where they buried it.
The Body in the Belfry is the first Padded Pew Mystery — a clean, faith-filled cozy where the coffee is strong, the casseroles are lethal only in reputation, and grace always gets the last word.