The House on Juniper Ridge
A house she never wanted. A mystery she can't leave behind.
Claire Bennett has ninety seconds of feeling grateful before she reads the condition.
Her grandmother left her a farmhouse on twenty-eight acres in the Texas Hill Country - sagging porch, sixty-year-old wiring, one bathroom, and a rooster nobody warned her about. Claire assembles land for developers in Austin. She can fix a house like this and sell it by August without ever learning her neighbors' names.
Except the will says she has to live in it for six months first.
Then a contractor opens the chimney and finds a wooden box that somebody sealed into the stone on purpose. Inside: a Bible, a photograph with one person cut out of it, and sixty-one letters written in 1954 by a woman named Evelyn Draper.
Juniper Ridge has one story about Evelyn, and the whole county tells it the same way. She ran off. Left a husband and a three-year-old daughter and never looked back.
The letters say otherwise. And the last one, seven lines on a torn half sheet, says this:
If anything happens to me, don't believe what they tell you.
Claire starts pulling records the way she has for nine years - chain of title, county deeds, church registers. What she finds is worse than a scandal. It's a form. Two men walked into a courthouse in the middle of a business day, filled out paperwork that was entirely legal in 1954, and paid a two-dollar filing fee. Everything after that was just Tuesday.
But the deeper Claire digs, the closer the trail comes to her own grandmother - and to a daughter, now seventy-five, who has spent a lifetime believing her mother didn't want her.
With a neighbor who won't tell her what she wants to hear, a town that would rather not be corrected, and a clock running out on the only reason she's still there, Claire has to decide what a truth is worth when telling it will cost people she has come to love.
A warm, faith-filled mystery about family secrets, buried records, and what it costs to tell the truth seventy-one years late. Perfect for readers of Christian romantic suspense, small-town women's fiction, and clean cozy mysteries.
The House on Juniper Ridge is Book One of The Rooted Mysteries.
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