Introducing my latest book: ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’

When I retired 15 years ago, I thought I’d try my hand at writing a mystery.  It took six months, and it taught me the difference between ‘thinking about doing something’ and actually doing it. That book, ‘A Murder in the Garden Club’ turned out to be very popular and, even better, gave me a cast of interesting and likeable characters whom I could incorporate into subsequent stories.

No suburban sprawl in Hardington

What I didn’t realize back then was one of my most important ‘characters’ was the book’s locale: Hardington, Massachusetts.  In other parts of the country, Hardington seems idyllic (except for all those murders): a small New England town, yet just a short commute to Boston. It’s a town without big-box stores or strip malls. It is surrounded by open space and has a near-four-century-long history. It’s the anthesis of the typical big-city suburb, where you know you’ve crossed municipal boundaries only because there’s another Home Depot.

Hardington and Medfield
are both southwest of Boston

Hardington is a lightly fictionalized version of the town my wife and I have called home (off and on) since 1980: Medfield, Massachusetts.  Medfield has just a handful of traffic lights and no streets wider than two lanes, yet it is just 17 miles from the center of Boston. It has about 13,000 residents scattered over 15 square miles. More than half the town’s land is off limits to development.

For ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’, I mined two nuggets of Medfield’s history.  First, for several years in the late 1800s, the town had a small artist’s colony focused on impressionist, plein air painting.  No less a figure than Isabella Stewart Gardner touted Medfield as having vistas comparable to Monet’s Giverny.  And, second, in 2006, AOL (then, a powerhouse internet service provider) tried to get permission from a judge to dig up a yard in Medfield. Why? Because the company believed a young internet spammer had buried millions of dollars of gold bars in his parents’ lawn. (There is some stuff you can’t make up.)

The roadside cottage still exists

I freely admit a soft spot for art.  It figures prominently in ‘Deadly Deeds’ and ‘A Murder at the Flower Show’. For my new book, I re-created that colony in the summer of 1889 and populated it with a mix of real and fictional artists. One of the real people is Dennis Miller Bunker, a gifted artist who died tragically young. One of his enduring paintings, which resides in the National Gallery of Art, is of a humble roadside cottage in Medfield.  I had a fictional artist, Alan Churchill Lawrence, paint a first version of it.

'The Pool, Medfield' by
Dennis Miller Bunker (1889)

Every good story needs a ‘heavy’, and mine is another fictional artist: Edward Merrill Cosgrove. He is already famous, powerful and wealthy with an oceanfront estate in Maine, yet he deigns to pay a visit to Hardington for reasons that become clear as the book progresses. 

After three days, though, two men appear at the boardinghouse’s door seeking an audience with Cosgrove. They do not get it. An agitated Cosgrove disappears for a day and, late that evening, Lawrence witnesses what he believes is the burial of the two men by Cosgrove and an accomplice behind the cottage Lawrence painted just a few days earlier.

'Gray Day on the Charles' by
John Leslie Breck (1889)

Lawrence knows Cosgrove is not a man to be crossed, yet he must be brought to justice. Lawrence adds a conspicuous spot of color to the painting and sends it off, along with pages from his journal, to his agent in Boston with instructions to find a way to get the material into the hands of the police.

Skip ahead 132 years. Liz Phillips (the amateur sleuth in the series) is accompanying her good friend, antiques dealer Roland Evans-Jones, to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts where, in exchange for having his painting cleaned, he is lending Alan Churchill Lawrence’s ‘Wayside Cottage’ for an upcoming MFA exhibition on New England plein air art colonies.  In MFA’s conservation studio and in the presence of the curator mounting the exhibit, the painting is taken out of its frame for the first time.  Out pops Lawrence’s journal, together with a plea by Lawrence to his art dealer for his help.

Isabella Stewart Gardner
as painted by Sargent

The curator immediately recognizes the journal as a powerful, historical artifact.  Cosgrove’s standing as the ‘Father of American Impressionism’ could be shaken to its foundation. She immediately sends PDFs of the journal to researchers for their comment.  Liz Phillips suggests digging up the site identified in the painting (the building still stands, little changed, from the time it was immortalized). Volunteers are recruited.  Detective John Flynn (the series’ other protagonist) gets involved to coordinate things. Hardington’s police chief even invites the media to record what is found.

Which, or course, is when all hell breaks loose. The heirs of Edward Merrill Cosgrove say the journal is a sensational forgery created by a publicity-seeking ‘used furniture dealer’. They demand the painting and journal be turned over to their experts for scrutiny.  And then, those volunteers at the wayside cottage sink their shovels down into the soil behind the wayside cottage… and strike something very unexpected.

Oh, and you’re only about a quarter way through the book.

How it all started

If you’ve not read the five ‘Hardington’ mysteries that precede this, you’ll find ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’ a satisfying stand-alone read with lots of humor, twists and turns; along with plot points turning on art, museum politics, robocalls, fractional jets, and some other things that would be spoilers to mention.

If you’ve kept up with the series, you’ll finally get Roland Evans-Jones’ back story, meet Liz’s daughter, Detective John Flynn’s wife, and get another helping of Felicity Snipes. And, for those who have been rooting for two lost souls to admit their attraction for one another… well, let’s say there’s some of that, too.

You can purchase print or Kindle copies of ‘Murder Brushed with Gold’ through Amazon, or print copies directly from the author at https://the-hardington-press.square.site/, or by contacting me directly. You can read the first chapters at www.TheHardingtonPress.com.

Heart Attack Snow

This post was supposed to be titled, ‘Winter Wonderland’. It was envisioned as a full-throated, self-congratulatory, thousand-word essay about being environmentally conscious even as you deal with the reality of snow-swept New England winter landscapes.

Medfield was supposed to be squarely in the 'jackpot zone'

Instead, I’m reduced to distantly remembering I used to gladly pay a dime at my local 7-11 on hot days to slurp a cupful of the stuff I’m now shoveling; except, back then, it was enhanced by a squirt of sickly-sweet fruit syrup.

We had been promised this snow
for three days

You see, we had a nor’easter last evening and today.  The same winter storm (they have names now, this one was Octavia) that drenched California and fouled travel across the Midwest, re-formed itself as a low-pressure system off the East Coast and dumped a foot and a half of snow on unsuspecting Queens.  Octavia then sets its sights on New England.  As late as 5 p.m., as flakes were starting to fall at the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, the National Weather Service still showed Medfield as squarely in the center of the ‘jackpot’ zone of 12” to 18” of snow.

Abigail jumping at snowflakes

I am ready for that kind of a snowfall.  For somebody who did not see snow until he was twenty years old, I have adapted rather well to the notion that precipitation can come frozen.  I topped off the gas in our snow blower, positioned it at the front of the garage door, and settled in for an evening of the kind of satisfied anticipation that comes with being well-prepared.  The snow arrived along with gale-force winds, turning trees into works of art.  Our ten-month-old, Florida-born cat, Abigail, jumped excitedly at the snowflakes falling on the outside of the living room window, unable to comprehend what was going on outside.

At about 9 p.m., Betty tilted her head and said, “that sounds like rain.”

“Nonsense,” I replied, with the confidence of someone who believes an army of forecasters armed with the infallible European Weather Model cannot possibly get things even a little wrong.

But I, too, heard the tinkling sound of raindrops against the windows.  I went to the Weather Channel website and saw the three-hour 'up-until-now' loop of solid snow overwhelming southern New England; getting darker blue by the second.  But I also saw something disturbing: the rain-snow line that was supposed to be solidly anchored on Cape Cod was, instead, stealthily advancing ever further into the mainland.

I tapped the ‘future’ button.  Sure enough, we were turning green. The loop showed Medfield had nothing but rain in its future. Somewhere, 30,000 feet over our heads, the gremlins controlling the storm's steering currents had decided to have a joke at my expense. Except, to me, it wasn’t going to be one bit funny.

No asphalt, just a stone driveway

At this point, you are probably wondering to yourself, What’s the big deal? Be happy it isn’t all that snow!

The first problem is, our property isn’t equipped to deal with wet, heavy snow.

Six years ago, when we were planning our ‘dream retirement house’, we went all-in on creating a home that would be one with nature.  No grass lawn, no invasive plants or trees, and nothing that would cause excess water to roll off our property and into the town’s storm drains. To meet that last requirement, we eschewed the idea of your standard asphalt driveway in favor of one made of crushed stone, held in place by decorative granite curbing. Rain water, rather than rolling down the gentle slope of the driveway to the street, would instead pass through the stone and soak into the subsoil, recharging the reservoir of moisture for our garden.

I mounted our snow 
blower on skis

And, if it snowed, I was ready: I retro-fitted a pair of Rossignol skis onto our hardy snow blower so the maw of the machine coasted half an inch above the driveway and sidewalk surface.  It is, if I can allow myself a moment of immodesty, a stroke of genius. I may even patent it one of these days.

The second problem is, there hasn’t been a snow blower made that can deal with water-soaked snow.  Put any model out on a driveway, fire it up, and watch as the icy residue dribbles out of the blower like an 18-month-old disgorging unwanted Gerber’s Squash Delight. 

An asphalt driveway can be
scraped clean in minutes

A homeowner with an asphalt driveway can pick up the phone, call some Guy with a Snow Plow on His Pickup Truck, and pay whatever extortion is demanded. I don’t have that option: a conventional snow plow will simply take off a cubic yard or two of crushed stone along with the snow, and deposit it either out on the street or in our perennial beds. (And don’t give me that ‘Oh, the snow plow operator can keep the blade up a couple of inches’ stuff. The Guy with a Snow Plow on His Pickup Truck has a laser-like focus on the goal of being in and out of your driveway in three minutes, with his pockets stuffed with enough cash to take the family to Disney World.)

The snow was water-soaked

This morning at 6:30 a.m., I went outside in drizzling rain to survey the scene.  The gremlins controlling the steering currents were slapping their knees with laughter.  While safely-inland Wilmington, Massachusetts recorded twenty inches of white, powdery snow; Medfield had six inches of snow permeated with at least an inch of water.  

A gift from the town

And, of course, down at the intersection of the driveway and the street, the Medfield Highway Department had thoughtfully deposited a ten-foot-wide, three-foot deep, and two-foot-high plug of pure ice. All of it had to be moved... by hand.

We call it ‘heart attack snow’.  Every shovelful weighs about thirty pounds. You move it for an hour and then your right arm goes numb. Cue the EMTs.

Betty took the sidewalk and an area immediately in front of the garage.  I first removed the plug of ice and then started up the 90-foot-long driveway, being careful to leave a skim of ice/snow on top of the

The finished driveway, a crust of snow

crushed rock. Two hours later, we had a clean sidewalk and a wide-enough passage that we can get our cars out into the world if needed.

As Kermit the Frog once reminded us, ‘It isn’t easy being green’. 

I would add it is definitely hard work sometimes.  And maybe even good exercise.