Dangerous Developments - Clara Moss

Frank Mercer owns the only garage in Maplewick Bay. She knows every vehicle in town, most of their owners, and more about the rhythms of the place than she'd ever admit to. She keeps her head down, does good work, goes home with Dust the basset hound, and minds her own business.

Then Mayor Ursula Underwood turns up dead.

The official verdict is natural causes: a diabetic accident, tragic but unremarkable. The police chief closes the case inside a week. Most of the town accepts it. Frank doesn't, because Ursula came to her garage the morning she died, distressed and half-dressed and unable to finish a sentence, and the sound of something wrong has been running in Frank's head ever since.

What follows isn't a formal investigation. Frank doesn't have a badge or a methodology. What she has is a town she's lived in her whole life, relationships built over decades of oil changes and brake jobs, and the mechanic's habit of listening for the fault underneath the surface noise. People talk to her. They always have.

What she finds is worse than she expected. And the people responsible would rather she stopped asking.

Dangerous Developments is a queer cozy mystery for readers who like their small towns complicated, their investigations built on patience and attention rather than car chases and confrontations, and their protagonists smart enough to know they're in over their head and stubborn enough to keep going anyway. Frank Mercer is not a detective. She's a mechanic. The difference matters to her, even when it stops mattering to everyone else.

The first book in the Mercer Mystery series.

Followed by Tinsel and Treachery.