The Write Off

Tax season. One shoebox. One black book nobody was supposed to read.

Retired accountant Walt Brubaker has agreed to one more tax season: three days a week at his old office on Main Street, at a white table with no drawers, doing returns for the people who will not drive to Allentown. His wife Grace has taken over the waiting room with a clipboard, a sheet of gold stars, and a time out chair facing the wall. Across the street, RAPID REFUND promises everybody a fortune, and its inflatable Statue of Liberty will not stay tied to the parking meter.

Then ninety one year old Erv Kemmerer, who has run the hardware store since 1958 and still gives every child two pieces of candy, brings in his shoebox. In the bottom is a black composition book full of columns Walt cannot make sense of. Erv takes it back. "Come by the store on the eleventh," he says. "I'll show you all of it."

On Fasnacht morning Erv is found at the bottom of his own cellar steps, in his slippers, on ice as thick as a windowpane, after four days without a drop of rain or snow. The town says an old man fell. The black book is gone.

There is a great nephew in Florida who calls his uncle's money gifts, a young tax preparer who sleeps on a cot behind the partition, and a will that leaves Walt a book nobody can find. Walt has until April fifteenth to do the one thing he has always done best. He is going to count.

Inside you'll find:

• A retired accountant who can tell you exactly how long ice takes to set at nineteen degrees
• A wife who runs a waiting room like a second grade classroom, and gets more out of a prison visit than the state police
• A best friend with a shoebox of receipts, a refund he is ashamed of, and a goat he did not mean to keep
• Fasnachts by the truckload, a Lenten fish fry, a Groundhog Lodge where English costs a quarter a word, and a mud sale nobody will forget
• Big laughs, real heart, and a fair play puzzle with every clue on the page

No graphic violence, no explicit scenes, no bad language. Just a good mystery, a small town full of people you'll want to visit again, and a good man's life added up the right way at last.

The Write Off is Book Four in the Vera Crus Funny Cozy Mystery series, and it stands on its own. Bring your shoebox. Grace will give you a number.