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A Hem For The Departed: A Historical Cozy Mystery of Silk, Secrets, and Murder
Paperback
Series: A Cora Bell Fontaine Mystery, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 19 2026
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Savannah's finest families trust Cora Bell Fontaine with their mourning clothes. They should be more careful with their secrets.
For thirty years, Cora has dressed the city's grief. Now recently widowed herself, the sixty-three-year-old Black dressmaker knows how to go unnoticed in a wealthy parlor: stand beside the curtains, keep a needle in hand, and let people mistake silence for ignorance.
It is a useful skill. Especially when someone dies.
When society matron Augusta Mayhew collapses during a funeral reception, the official explanation comes a little too easily. But Cora has spent a lifetime studying what other people overlook-and something about this death refuses to sit straight.
A hidden slash in black silk. A trace of starch where it has no business being. A missing mourning brooch that concealed more than sentiment.
Someone in that elegant house has been very careful. Just not careful enough for a dressmaker.
With a laundress who knows too much, a schoolteacher niece who worries for good reason, and a widowed carriage driver whose memories reach deep into the waterfront, Cora begins teasing apart the respectable story Savannah is so eager to accept.
The thread leads toward a secret buried since the waterfront fire of 1898. And finding out who killed Augusta means asking questions among people accustomed to giving orders, never answers.
Cora has spent thirty years keeping her clients' confidences.
This is one secret she intends to let out.
Set among spring azaleas, polished parlors, and the closely guarded lives of 1926 Savannah, A Hem For The Departed introduces a warm, wry senior sleuth with a dressmaker's eye and little patience for a poorly concealed lie.
A clean historical cozy mystery featuring a fully solved murder, no graphic content, and the first clues to a deeper mystery in the Cora Bell Fontaine Mystery series.
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