I’m Jo Jones—and I am autistic. So yes, I find social interactions hard and unpredictable… but that’s nothing compared to murder. Murder is super inconvenient.
It’s not as though I want to be a magnet for mayhem. It just kind of happens that way. One minute you’re minding your own business, trying to rent your cottage attic so you can make end’s meet (while secretly researching the missing baby of a long-lost ancestor and finding the provenance on a haunted—I mean unusual—family portrait), and the next you’re dealing with yet another dead body. At least this one wasn’t found on my rug.
“That’s the second time,” said Detective James MacAdams, NOT my boyfriend, thank you very much. Though he’s wrong. It’s the third time. Fourth, if you count the body buried under the estate house that burned down while I was still in it. But obviously that had been there ages, unlike the murderer who…
I’m doing it again. The oversharing thing. It’s not on purpose; but frankly, an awful lot has been going on since I moved to the supposedly quiet hills of north Yorkshire. It’s pronounced Yorksure, by the way, which was news to me. Though I do know it’s named for the walled town of York, UK—a once-Celtic town called Eboracum, but renamed Eoforic by the Angles, which apparently means “lots of wild boar.” In case you were wondering, and you probably weren’t, but I once edited a book on it. That was my job until quite recently (minus one divorce and a move overseas to take possession of that house people are buried under). Anyway. Back to the corpse on the moor…
I didn’t find it this time. That honor fell to Roberta, the very smart, very crusty, slightly scary old woman who runs the town museum. It made her late for the opening festival of the estate gardens, which made Detective MacAdams even later. You can’t just leave the dead lying around. Especially when they have been dumped in a ditch, head bashed in and lying next to a peculiar (and extremely old) artifact from antiquity. Honestly, it shouldn’t have involved me at all. Except, well. I might be the last person to see him alive. At least I’m not a suspect this time. I think.
Obviously, the festival has to go on. I mean, Tula and Ben from the Red Lion have made eleven-thousand sausage rolls. Can’t leave those lying around either. So here I am, hiding out in the tea tent and trying to get my head on straight—because without Roberta, I have to give the opening speech. Yes, I have everything memorized. That’s not the point. People want to talk to you afterwards—and doing this sort of thing makes me feel punch drunk. It’s all fine while you’re holding forth on your special interest. That’s just me and information soup. It’s Q and A I’m afraid of. Lucky me, it looks like I’ll be saved the indignity… The detective has come at last! Oh. Because I have to give a statement about my movements. Dang it. I might be a suspect again after all…
The Dead Come to Stay – A Jo Jones Mystery, Book 2
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Release: August 2025
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Purchase Link
An amateur autistic sleuth. A wry English detective. A murder case that thrusts them both into the wealthy world of the rare artifacts trade…
Jo Jones can’t seem to catch a break. She’d hoped that trading in her city life for the cozy, peaceful hills of North Yorkshire to take over her family estate would finally be her chance for a “fresh start.” Instead, she’s been thrust further into the past than she thought possible. The estate property is littered with traces of ancestors that Jo never knew existed, including a mysterious woman depicted in a half-destroyed painting inside the estate – and also including Jo’s late uncle, who may hold the key to her cryptic family history. Add to all this the gossipy town politics that Jo’s forced to navigate as a neurodivergent transplanted American. And that’s not even getting to the murder yet.
When the prickly town detective James MacAdams discovers a body in the woods with coincidental ties to Jo Jones, they’re forced to team up on the case. The clues will lead them into the wealthiest locales of Yorkshire, from sparkling glass hotels to luxury property sites to elite country clubs. But below the glittering surfaces, Jo and MacAdams discover darker schemes brewing. Local teens, many of them international refugees, are disappearing left and right, and each case is somehow linked to a shady architectural firm – which also happened to employ the dead man from the woods.
What began as an unusual murder case plunges Jo and MacAdams into the underground world of rare artifacts and antique trading… and the murderer may not be finished yet…
Meet the author
Brandy Schillace is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher. She is the creator of Peculiar Book Club, a twice-monthly live-streamed YouTube show. A former professor of English and gothic literature, she writes about gender politics and history, medical mystery, and neurodiversity for outlets such as Scientific American, Wired, CrimeReads, and Medium. She is also autistic, though has not (to her knowledge) been a suspect in a murder investigation.