Kettle Bend Mysteries

Gwen Beltram has spent nearly fifty years listening to what other people miss.

A third-generation piano tuner in Kettle Bend, she thought she knew every sound the town’s aging buildings could make. Then the historic Aldermann Opera House reopens after decades of silence — and Verna Krieger, chair of its restoration committee, turns up dead before the piano Gwen has come to tune ever makes a sound.

Everyone in town has a tidy explanation ready. None of them quite fit.

What Gwen keeps circling back to is a night in 1978 that nobody wants to talk about — a fire, mostly forgotten, that left more behind than anyone admitted at the time.

She works through the opera house one key at a time, and one old grudge at a time, and begins to understand that some silences in a small town aren’t peaceful. They are only waiting.

Book One of The Kettle Bend Mysteries — a fair-play cozy mystery about long memories, old debts, and the kind of quiet that only comes from decades of practice.

Some rooms stay locked for a reason. This one held sixty-six years’ worth.

When the Kettle Bend Odd Fellows lodge finally reopens its sealed second-floor meeting room ahead of the town’s 130th-anniversary celebration, Gwen Beltram expects nothing more than a straightforward restoration job — a dusty Aeolian player piano, a stuck cabinet, a town’s worth of forgotten history.

She doesn’t expect Evelyn Pike, the town’s retired deputy register of deeds, to find something buried in the lodge’s old paperwork that isn’t supposed to still be there. And she doesn’t expect Evelyn to turn up dead in that same locked room three days later — with an alibi so clever it very nearly works.

Someone in Kettle Bend has spent sixty-five years protecting a secret worth killing to keep quiet. Tuning pianos by day and pulling at the threads of a decades-old land fraud by night, with her sharp-eared fifteen-year-old apprentice Katie right alongside her, Gwen has to listen for the one false note in a town full of people she has known her whole life.

Somewhere between a courthouse ledger, a missing inventory number, and a waltz that keeps playing on a loop, the truth is hiding in plain sight — and Gwen has to hear it before whoever silenced Evelyn Pike decides she has listened closely enough.

Book Two of The Kettle Bend Mysteries, following The Last Tuning — a fair-play cozy mystery for readers who like their small towns close-knit, their sleuths sharp, and their secrets decades in the making.

When a historic church organ begins revealing secrets someone tried to silence, Gwen Beltram has to listen carefully — or miss the truth hiding between the notes.

Gwen and her fifteen-year-old apprentice, Katie Vogel, travel to Bellweather to help assess a treasured nineteenth-century tracker organ before a church merger. Gwen is no organ expert, but she knows how to observe an instrument honestly. Mismatched pipes, altered records, and gaps in the church’s paperwork soon suggest that the organ standing in St. Anselm may not be the instrument the congregation believes it is.

Then church historian Ruth Weber is found dead before she can explain what she uncovered.

With Detective Broders firmly leading the investigation, Gwen and Katie assist where their knowledge is useful, separating evidence from assumption as financial pressure, hidden dealings, and long-kept secrets come into view. The closer the organ is examined, the clearer it becomes that someone has been counting on its silence.

Book Three of The Kettle Bend Mysteries — a small-town investigation solved through patience, craftsmanship, and careful listening.