Hi, my name is Lia, and I’m a knitter. Delighted to say so, I might add. I’ve been one most of my life but have been knitting only lately for people I don’t know. After my husband, Tom, died unexpectedly, our plans for early retirement changed drastically. Seeing me grieving and at loose ends, my good friend, Belinda, urged me to move to her nearby town of Crandalsburg, Pennsylvania and to join the Crandalsburg Craft Fair, which she managed. It changed my life, and this time for the better.

Now I’m running a booth for the Ninth Street Knitters, my group of knitting friends back in York. We’d been meeting weekly and had all begun to run out of people to knit for. Suddenly we could knit to our heart’s content and earn a bit of money from it (to pay for more yarn!)

The Crandalsburg Craft Fair runs on weekends in a beautiful historic barn that once served as a hospital during the Civil War. I love driving up to it each craft fair morning, and I love meeting the shoppers and selling Ninth Street Knits: sweaters, baby outfits, afghans, knitted placemats, and so much more!

But early on, a dark shadow fell over the craft fair when Belinda’s ex-husband, Darren, showed up and announced he intended to buy that beautiful barn and tear it down to develop the land. Furious, Belinda claimed he was doing it for revenge on her. But it would hurt so many vendors as well!

I’ll never forget that next morning. It was Mother’s Day. My daughter had driven from her first post-college apartment in Philadelphia to my little house in Crandalsburg for the weekend. We enjoyed a dinner together the night before, and she planned to join me for lunch on Sunday at the Craft Fair.

I arrived at the barn a little early that Sunday morning and saw two cars in the parking lot—Belinda’s and another I didn’t recognize. Inside the barn, Belinda stared down at the body of her ex, Darren. He’d been killed by a blow to the head with a heavy, handcrafted pot, whose pottery shards lay scattered nearby. Other craft pieces from the fair had been bizarrely placed around his body.

Belinda looked up as I approached, a stunned look on her face. “I didn’t do it,” she said, and I believed her. Cantankerous as she could sometimes be, I knew my friend was incapable of such violence. But I also knew it looked bad. After she’d been such a help to me, it was now my turn to help her, to keep her from being charged with murder. I had only one problem.

How?

A Wicked Yarn is the first book in the NEW “Craft Fair Knitters” cozy mystery series, released December 29, 2020.

Mother’s Day should be a cinch for the good folks of the Crandalsburg Craft Fair, and knitting enthusiast Lia Geiger has a good feeling about this year’s yield. But things quickly get knotty when Lia’s daughter announces she’s quit her job and Lia finds herself tangled up in the murder of her best friend’s ex-husband. While Belinda’s alibi quickly gets her off the hook, nasty rumors spread throughout Crandalsburg that shroud the entire fair in suspicion.

Could the vendors be responsible for the murder of a man hell-bent on unraveling the fair just days before his death? Lia and her crafty group of Ninth Street Knitters must put down their needles to gather clues and save the crafting community they’ve grown to love.

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About the author
Emmie Caldwell is a pen name for Mary Ellen Hughes, the national bestselling author of the Keepsake Cove Mysteries, the Pickled and Preserved Mysteries, the Craft Corner Mysteries, and the Maggie Olenski Mysteries. A native of Wisconsin, she’s lived most of her adult life in Maryland, which, along with surrounding areas, has inspired many of her stories.

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