The Watch That Stopped (The Last Box Mysteries, #4)

A stopped watch should tell you when something ended. This one proves somebody lied about when it began.

When estate clean-out specialist Nell is asked to sort through the workshop of recently deceased watchmaker Samuel Dyer, she finds something Samuel deliberately left for her: a silver pocket watch frozen at 2:17.

The same time his estranged former business partner, Frank Mercer, supposedly died at the marina.

There's just one problem.

Frank's phone called Samuel fourteen minutes later.

Samuel and Frank had once been best friends and partners in a clock-repair business, until a tragic 2003 accident during the restoration of Grayhaven's clock tower killed a young worker and destroyed their friendship. Now, more than twenty years later, the two men had begun meeting again-and arguing about what really happened that day.

As Nell and Piper follow Samuel's carefully planted clues, the simple timeline begins to fall apart. A clock stopped at the wrong time. A missing storage key. Old maintenance records. A brass counterweight that may-or may not-be evidence. And a family with very good reasons to keep the past from being examined too closely.

Then it becomes clear that Frank Mercer's death was no accident.

With Detective Adrian Shaw investigating and Nell discovering that clocks can lie just as effectively as people, she must reconstruct two timelines separated by decades-and figure out which piece of evidence everyone has been reading backward.

Because Samuel Dyer understood something most people forget:

The dial is only an opinion.

The Watch That Stopped is Book Four of The Last Box Mysteries, a clean contemporary cozy mystery series featuring small-town secrets, an amateur sleuth, family history, light romance, and forgotten objects that refuse to stay forgotten.