On the heels of two bestsellers, everyone’s favorite paranormal detective embarks on her eighteenth cozy adventure. Watch out for Nancy Atherton's latest,  Aunt Dimity and the King's Ransom , coming in July 2018 from Viking! It’s a cold, dreary February in the sleepy village of Finch and Lori Shepherd has two stir-crazy kids on her hands. So she leaps at the chance to visit Skeaping Manor, a bizarre Jacobean-house-turned-museum. There she meets Daisy Pickering, a sweet, but strange little girl from a poor family who spins a wild tale about the Russian aristocrats who once owned the priceless silver pieces on display. A few days later, Daisy’s shabby pink parka turns up at Lori’s thrift shop—with a silver sleigh figurine in the pocket. Lori tries to track down the Pickering family, only to find that they’ve disappeared without a trace. A delightful whodunit stretching back to the Russian Revolution, Aunt Dimity and the Lost Prince will beguile new and longtime fans.   Praise for Nancy Atherton and the Aunt Dimity series "Atherton smoothly blends history, village life, and the otherworldly." — Publishers Weekly "Every scene is superbly crafted to perfection. Even if you have not read all the books in this series, I have not, you can enjoy and immerse yourself in this cozy mystery.”  — Open Book Society "I love the graceful style... the sense of tight-knit community, characters who aren’t afraid to be themselves, and, the unique paranormal element...I only wish I had learned about this series earlier."  —Gotta Write Network "In the realm of the cozy mystery, there are few series that can hold a candle to Atherton's Aunt Dimity series."  —everydayebook.com   "Atherton is a superb writer who brings a lot of charm and wit to her story."  — Suspense Magazine "Always a charming read, the Aunt Dimity series is just right for when life gets too hectic and you need to slow down a bit."  — Deadly Pleasures Magazine "Let Nancy Atherton and Aunt Dimity remind you of the reason you got hooked on books in the first place. I promise you will be scouring bookstores for more of the series after you give it a taste."  — CrimeCritics.com Nancy Atherton is the bestselling author of twenty-two Aunt Dimity Mysteries. The first book in the series,  Aunt Dimity's Death , was voted "One of the Century's 100 Favorite Mysteries" by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. She lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. One I’ve heard it said that when the poet T. S. Eliot was writing The Wasteland , he chose February as the cruelest month, then changed it to April in revisions. If you ask me, he got it right the first time. As far as I’m concerned, February’s only redeeming feature is its brevity. If it were any longer, I would tear it from my calendar in protest. Leap years? Don’t talk to me about leap years. I suppose they serve a useful purpose, but if we must add an extra day to the calendar every now and again, why not add it to July? Or August? Or September? Why prolong the most miserable month of the year when we have so many pleasant months to choose from? Leap years, I’m convinced, were invented solely to torment me. January isn’t so bad. January offers a pleasant return to routine after the hectic holiday season. The Christmas tree has been mulched or planted or turned into a bird feeder. The twinkly lights and the ornaments have been stored in the attic. The living room is spacious again, the dining room tidy, the kitchen organized. With the cessation of gift shopping, card writing, cookie baking, crèche building, church decorating, and Nativity play rehearsing, time itself is uncluttered. Grown-ups are back at work, children are back in school, and life ticks along with the soothing regularity of a well-oiled grandfather clock. By the first of February, however, the novelty of normalcy has worn off. Christmas is but a distant memory and spring isn’t even a glimmer on the horizon. It seems as though it has always been and will always be winter—bleak, cold, gray, dismal winter—with no respite in sight. If one lived in New Zealand, one might regard the second month of the year as the jewel in summer’s crown, but I lived in England and I regarded February as the lump of coal in my Christmas stocking. It seemed churlish to grumble as yet another February hove into view because my life was in so many ways idyllic. I was married to a wonderful man, we had two beautiful children, and we lived in a honey-colored stone cottage in the Cotswolds, a rural region in England’s West Midlands. The nearest hub of civilization was Finch, a tiny village surrounded by rolling hills, patchwork fields, and not much else. Traffic jams were unknown in Finch, litter was seldom seen, and crime was virtually nonexistent. The villagers’ lives revolved around local events and a never ending stream of delicious gossip. A better woman might have turned a deaf ear to the tittle-tattle, but I wasn’t a better woman. I believed q