The Boundary Line by Jennie Wren Foster — Kindle Ebook
This Kindle ebook is available through Amazon. Purchase and ebook delivery take place on Amazon.
Release date: December 11, 2026
A retired recorder. A century-old compass. And a boundary line that was never where the county said it was.
Late October in Kettlebrook, Vermont, means the leaf-peepers have gone home, the Founders’ Day Harvest Festival is two weeks out, and antiques-shop owner Addie Wrent is looking forward to a quiet stretch before Thanksgiving. Then retired town recorder Midge Colby walks into Crabapple Antiques with a brass surveyor’s compass wrapped in a dish towel, asks Addie to keep it safe until she’s “said her piece” at Thursday’s festival planning meeting, and walks back out without another word.
Thursday never comes. Midge is found dead near the old quarry overlook the morning the festival opens, an overturned thermos beside her, the death ruled a quiet cardiac event. Addie knows better, because the compass in her shop has started doing something none of her other animated antiques have ever done: it locks dead still and hums on a true line, and skitters into confusion on a false one, and it will not stop pointing at a stretch of town commons everyone in Kettlebrook has always simply assumed belonged to the town.
Twelve feet. That is the gap between the boundary line the county’s modern deed draws around the old Town Quarry and the line the original 1791 survey actually laid down, and whoever holds that twelve feet holds the only real road into land a regional gravel company would very much like to develop. The Kettlebrook Heritage Preservation Fund has spent two years publicly fighting to keep that land common. Which is exactly the kind of thing that is usually hiding something underneath.
With her archivist almost-something Perry Watt, a missing ledger, a sixty-four-year-old resurvey nobody was supposed to question, and a shop full of opinionated antiques who help exactly as much as they meddle, Addie has to build a case against a woman the whole town trusts, before the quarry, and Midge’s forty-one years of careful paperwork, disappear into somebody else’s deed for good. And after three books of almost, of nearly, of not yet, Addie is about to run out of reasons to keep pretending she doesn’t already know how she feels about the man who keeps showing up.
The Boundary Line is the fourth Crabapple Antiques Mystery: a cozy, fair-play whodunit with a meddling small town, a slow-burn romance that finally catches, and a cast of opinionated objects who have never once been merely decorative. Murder off the page, warmth on every one.
Author: Jennie Wren Foster