Crossed by Death

Salvaging from historic buildings isn’t supposed to require reporting a murder. When salvage expert, historian, and single mom Paisley Sutton crawls into an abandoned store with a house attached, she certainly isn’t expecting to find a body on site. But soon, her discovery sends Paisley on an expedition through history that links this murder to the one that led the previous owners to abandon the building in the first place. And someone doesn’t want her to salvage this story from the wreckage. Can Paisley preserve herself and her young son while also uncovering the stories that matter most?

ACF Bookens loves a good mystery, a quaint bookshop, and a good cup of coffee. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she takes joy in the mountain views and the quiet back roads. She lives with her son and three rescue cats who are, of course, nocturnal.

Aslan, the cat in her books, is based on her departed first cat by that name, who spent an inordinate amount of time digging up her houseplants.

In her books, Bookens addresses issues of justice and writes with intention to disrupt the white supremacy that says that ＂whiteness＂ is normal by making purposeful note of every character’s ethnicity. She is weary of books that assume everyone is white unless the author says otherwise because being white is not the default of reality.

Her hope is that readers enjoy escaping into her stories and are challenged, just a little, to make themselves better people and the world a better place from the reading.