Messenger Out Of Time
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Ria’s adventure in sleuthing ends on New Year’s Eve in Book 2, Messenger Out Of Time in the Ria Quinn Mystery Series!
During the annual holiday festivals in Shokan Falls, Ria discovers a prehistoric peat bog on the outskirts of town. It lies near an abandoned state hospital, once known as an insane asylum.
As an amateur archaeologist exploring prehistoric artifacts in England and Ireland, she had come across unstable bogs before, places where ancient bodies lay hidden beneath. She just has to check this one out. Only, when she takes a few steps across it, the body of a woman surfaces, one Ria knows has not spent millennia in such a watery grave.
Soon after, remarkable footage shows up in an old film she is given, suggesting the insane asylum may have been built over a Neolithic village, though this is in wild dispute.
Ria is pulled into a mystery that inextricably links the woman in the bog to the asylum and to a Native American legend drawn out of the landscape of the Hudson River Valley. Despite the wishes (and orders) of local Sheriff Gareth Matheson and resistance from the mayor of Shokan Falls, she cannot help but investigate it all, with her golden retriever Hailey at her side.
And when the mayor is found dead inside the ruins of the asylum, Ria must discover the truth about a secret held in silence for too long.
Excerpt from Messenger Out of Time…
The sun was still hidden behind the clouds. Even so, the bog showed the green of the grasses and moss, the dark brown of sediment that had risen, and the slate-colored pools of water that appeared often in places. Treacherous ground.
Yet she had done it before, managed to use careful footwork by moving from the settled mounds of grass one by one, creating a safe path. Ria knew doing this without anyone else along was foolhardy at best, but she had to see it. She would go no more than a few feet in, she promised herself. The deeper areas would be much further in, close to the raised center of the bog.
Tentatively, Ria put her right foot forward. The surface grass sank under the water. She stepped back and then chose a different place where the tufted grass and vegetation were more clustered. This time it held her weight so she brought her left foot over and stood looking around. A similar solid area lay two feet ahead and she easily reached it.
“One more, just for druthers,” she said, and stepped forward again. The ground still held firm, though all around her was evidence of how unstable the bog had to be.
All right, she thought. She’d followed her impulse. Enough for now. Someone had told her that her tenacity for doing something matched that of a bull terrier. Maybe so. It was certainly true she often felt unrest until she’d followed through on anything that grabbed her interest.
“Actually, it can be exhausting, always following a lead,” she said aloud. And smiled again. There was nothing she loved more.
Slowly turning around to retrace her steps back out of the bog, Ria studied the surface to make sure nothing had changed. Getting to the second secure grass area was easy, but she saw the first one was further away now. How could that be? Then she realized that wasn’t what she was looking at. The grass had been slightly flattened by something pushing at it that hadn’t been there before. She couldn’t tell what it was but the idea was exciting—a treasure from the depths of the bog already!
She stepped onto the first mound of grass closest to the edge of the bog and bent down carefully to see what was there. In that moment if she hadn’t kept her wits about her she would have fallen into the watery mass, and its unknown depths.
For what pressed against the grassy mound was a body, a woman wearing a heavy cashmere coat. Not a bog body from the Bronze Age, not by a long shot…
Read more of Messenger Out of Time to follow Ria’s search for both ruins and murderers in this second volume of the series.
Book categories: Cozy Mystery