I'm pleased to welcome Abigail B. Hartwell to Cozy Up With Kathy today. Abigail writes The Plain Truth Mystery series. THE SECRET IN THE SAMPLER is the first book in the series and was released
Kathy:In THE SECRET IN THE SAMPLER Nora Bell reopens her Aunt Lenora’s old letterpress and stationery shop. I love stationery and make my own greeting cards. I even have a crafter's version of a letterpress. So do you write letters or send cards?
ABH: I do, although I’m much better about cards than I am about actual letters. I still send birthday cards, sympathy cards, anniversary cards, and the occasional “I saw this and thought of you” card. There is something about receiving an actual envelope among the bills and advertisements that still feels special.
My daughters tease me because I keep cards that most sensible people would have thrown away years ago. I have birthday cards from my girls when they were children, cards from my husband sent from the road, and little notes that probably mean nothing to anyone except me. Paper remembers things differently than a text message does.
That affection for paper certainly found its way into The Bell & Quill. Nora notices paper texture, ink, type, handwriting, and the physical history of documents because those are things I notice too, although I should probably clarify that I have never solved a murder by examining stationery. So far.
Kathy:Nora uncovers a sampler that may hold family secrets. Do you have family heirlooms or family secrets?
ABH: Heirlooms, yes. Secrets? Every family has them. Most of mine are fortunately much less dramatic than the ones I give Nora.
I’m less interested in expensive heirlooms than in ordinary things that somehow survive. A recipe written in somebody’s handwriting, a photograph with a name penciled on the back, an old piece of furniture nobody can quite remember acquiring. Those objects fascinate me because their monetary value can be almost nothing while their emotional value is enormous.
That idea is at the heart of THE SECRET IN THE SAMPLER. Nora discovers that something domestic and seemingly harmless can carry a history nobody bothered to put into an official record. The series keeps returning to that notion. Samplers, invitations, ledgers, quilts, hymnbooks, maps, recipes and other ordinary objects become witnesses in their own quiet way.
As for my own family secrets, I believe some stories belong to the people who lived them. A mystery writer learns very quickly that there is a difference between being curious and being entitled to know everything.
Kathy:Nora's unexpected ally is Eli Yoder, a reserved Amish widower and auction clerk. I live not too far from a few Amish communities. Why do you think readers find Amish characters so appealing?
ABH: Part of it is probably the contrast with modern life. Many readers are surrounded by notifications, traffic, schedules, screens, and constant noise. Amish communities appear to offer a different rhythm built around family, faith, work, and community.
But I try to be careful with that attraction because Amish people are not decorations for a picturesque setting. They have personalities, disagreements, grief, humor, stubbornness, family problems, financial worries, and complicated relationships just like anyone else.
That is very important with Eli. I never wanted him to be “the handsome mysterious Amish widower.” He is a father, an auction clerk, a widower, a man of faith, and occasionally a remarkably stubborn human being. His Amish identity matters enormously, particularly because his developing feelings for Nora involve genuine differences between their worlds. He’s not there just to make the relationship seem exotic.
Kathy:What first drew you to mysteries?
ABH: Probably the satisfaction of discovering that something ordinary isn't ordinary at all.
I've always loved stories where the solution was hiding in plain sight, particularly when the answer depends more on observation than violence. An old photograph, the wording of a letter, somebody remembering the wrong date, a detail everyone else dismissed. Those are much more interesting to me than explosions and car chases.
I also like what mysteries allow a writer to explore. The crime asks, “What happened?” but the better question is usually, “Why did people allow this to happen?” That takes you into family, loyalty, money, shame, love, resentment, and all those wonderfully inconvenient human things.
Kathy:Do you write in any other genres?
ABH: At the moment, mysteries are where I feel most at home. I enjoy weaving family history, relationships, humor, and a very slow romantic thread into them, so the books aren't simply puzzles with a body attached.
I have notebooks containing ideas that would probably qualify as women's fiction, historical fiction, or even straight family drama. Whether any of them behave well enough to become books remains to be seen. My notebooks have far more ambition than I do.
Kathy:Tell us about your series.
ABH: The Plain Truth Mysteries follow widowed Nora Bell after she returns to Briar Creek, Ohio, and inherits her Aunt Lenora's old letterpress shop, The Bell & Quill. Nora discovers that the shop's decades of invitations, memorial cards, auction notices, maps, labels, ledgers, and private printing jobs contain an astonishing amount of unfinished history.
Her investigative partner is Eli Yoder, an Amish widower and auction clerk. Nora understands paper and printing; Eli understands auctions, land, family histories, and the things a community remembers without ever writing them down. The mysteries grow out of that partnership and the question that runs through the series: when does silence protect someone, and when does it protect the wrong person?
Kathy:Do you have a favorite character? If so, who and why?
ABH: I suppose I'm expected to say Nora, but I have a tremendous affection for Maeve Hartley.
Maeve owns the bed-and-breakfast and possesses the remarkable ability to turn hospitality into surveillance. She is generous, bossy, perceptive, and convinced that offering somebody a scone gives her limited jurisdiction over their personal life.
Nora is probably closest to me temperamentally, though. She watches before she speaks, has little patience for false cheer, and occasionally judges people by their choice of typeface. I would like to claim that last quality is entirely fictional.
Kathy:Did you have a specific inspiration for your series?
ABH: Several things came together.
I have lived near Amish communities long enough to be interested in the places where Amish and Englisch lives overlap: auctions, farm stands, hardware stores, roads, schools, businesses, tourism, and ordinary neighbor relationships. Those intersections seemed much more interesting to me than writing an idealized “Amish world” sealed away from everyone else.
I also had years of little mystery fragments. An odd piece of paper. An estate-sale object. A name that shouldn't appear in a record. A family story that didn't quite make sense.
Eventually I realized they all belonged in the same place.
The Bell & Quill became the mechanism that could connect them. People bring Nora paper without realizing they are also bringing her their history.
Kathy: What made you decide to publish your work?
ABH: My family, mostly.
I had accumulated story ideas and fragments for years and treated them as something I did privately. Once our daughters were grown and out on their own, I had more room in my life to consider what those fragments might become.
My husband and daughters kept encouraging me to stop talking about someday writing a novel and actually finish one. Families can be terribly inconvenient when they begin making sense.
Eventually I realized I was waiting for some official permission that was never going to arrive. So I wrote the book.
Kathy:If you could have a dinner party and invite four authors, living or dead, in any genre, who would you invite?
ABH: Agatha Christie would have to be there. I would want to ask her about everything from misdirection to how she survived people endlessly asking where she got her ideas.
Jane Austen, because I suspect her observations over dinner would be far more entertaining than the dinner itself.
Louise Penny, because I admire the way she makes community and character as important as the crime.
And Shirley Jackson, partly because she was brilliant and partly because I have a feeling the conversation would become wonderfully strange before dessert.
I would make something uncomplicated and spend the entire evening hoping nobody criticized it in prose later.
Kathy:What are you currently reading?
ABH: I usually have more than one book going. Right now I'm alternating between a mystery and some nonfiction about local or social history. I particularly enjoy books that examine ordinary lives rather than only famous people and famous events.
Oddly enough, I am reading the Jo Nesbø book COCKROACHES; very different from what I normally read.
For pleasure reading, I return often to writers such as Louise Penny and Anne Perry, and I still pick up Christie when I want to remind myself how efficiently a mystery can be constructed.
I also have an embarrassing number of books sitting beside my bed that I continue calling “the next one.”
Kathy:Will you share any of your hobbies or interests with us?
ABH: Reading, naturally. Gardening, although the deer on our property regard that as a cooperative enterprise and we disagree about the division of produce.
I like old paper, antiques with some actual wear on them, local history, country auctions, and poking around small towns. I enjoy cooking and baking, particularly when our daughters and grandchildren are visiting.
We live on about five acres, most of it wooded, so I also spend a fair amount of time outside. I don't think of myself as a serious birdwatcher, but I own binoculars and have interrupted conversations to identify birds, so the evidence may be mounting against me.
Church and family take up an important part of my life as well. My husband is a long-haul truck driver, so when he's home I try not to fill every minute with plans. Sometimes sitting at the kitchen table with coffee and nowhere we need to go is quite enough.
Kathy:Name four items you always have in your fridge or pantry.
ABH: Coffee, eggs, butter, and flour.
There are almost always potatoes too, but you asked for four and I am attempting to demonstrate restraint.
There is also an alarming amount of cheese whenever grandchildren have recently visited.
Kathy:Do you have plans for future books either in your current series or a new series?
ABH: Absolutely. I have a long list of Plain Truth mysteries planned, and one of the pleasures of the series is that the central idea gives me tremendous room to experiment without abandoning Briar Creek. There are a handful in the series that I’ve released, but the perfectionist in me wonders if I didn’t rush it. Because, you know, 10 years isn’t enough time.
Nora's cases can begin with a sampler, an invitation, a ledger, a quilt label, a hymnal, a cemetery map, a recipe box, an orchard map, an old will, or even a postcard. Some involve murder, but others involve fraud, disappearance, theft, sabotage, or buried family history. I don't want readers arriving in Briar Creek already knowing exactly what kind of crime they are going to get.
And Nora and Eli still have quite a bit to figure out. I am determined not to hurry them simply because readers may occasionally want to reach into the book and knock their heads together.
I also have ideas outside the series. Whether they become another mystery series or something entirely different is still being decided in several notebooks.
Kathy:What's your favorite thing about being an author?
ABH: Taking something that existed only as a scrap of an idea and watching it become a place other people can enter.
Briar Creek began as fragments: an old printing shop, a widowed woman returning home, an Amish auction clerk, a sampler, an aunt who knew too much. Eventually those pieces became Nora and Eli and Maeve and The Bell & Quill. Now there are roads I can picture, rooms I know, families with histories, and stories waiting behind drawers I haven't opened yet. THE SECRET IN THE SAMPLER establishes that foundation with Nora's return to Briar Creek, the inherited shop, and the first secret carried by an ordinary object.
The best part is when a reader tells me that for a few hours, Briar Creek felt like somewhere they had actually been.
That's a rather remarkable thing for a collection of words on paper to accomplish.
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Review
THE SECRET IN THE SAMPLER by Abigail B. Hartwell
The First Plain Truth Mystery
Nora Bell has come to Briar Creek, Ohio to take over her late aunt's letterpress and stationery shop. What she finds is a sampler that holds secrets, people who want those secrets to remain hidden, and a warning from her aunt. She also finds untrustworthy antiques dealers, a curious friend, and an unlikely collaborator in Eli Yoder, an Amish widower. Tension gets even higher when someone ends up dead. It's one thing to try to take possession of the sampler, but to kill? Working together with Eli, Maeve, and local law enforcement Nora will attempt to uncover the secrets in the sampler and let the truth come to light.
I enjoyed meeting the characters in THE SECRET IN THE SAMPLER. Nora makes an admirable protagonist. A widow, she's starting a new chapter in life. Maeve is the fun and funny supporting friend, strong, capable, with muffins. Eli is the strong silent type. A widower he's willing to open himself up, and allow Nora to be herself.
The first Plain Truth Mystery has dialogue that dances. It thrusts and parries. While the physical action moves at a slower pace in Briar Creek, the conversations move the story forward with quick witted repartee. While paper may be Nora's forte, words are its author's. Challenges, duels, and admissions create a chess match of words.
THE SECRET IN THE SAMPLER is a mystery wrapped in cleverness and wit. I enjoyed my time in Briar Creek and I look forward to returning to see what other secrets lie in wait, hidden in objects many would dismiss.
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The Secret in the Sampler: A Plain Truth Mystery
by Abigail B. Hartwell
About The Secret in the Sampler
What would you do if the family heirloom hidden in your aunt’s estate could expose a stolen inheritance—and make you the next person someone needs silenced?
Two years after losing her husband, Nora Bell returns to the quiet Ohio Amish-country town of Briar Creek to settle her late aunt’s estate. She expects dusty type drawers, unpaid bills, and enough sympathy casseroles to survive a minor siege. Reopening The Bell & Quill, Aunt Lenora’s old letterpress and stationery shop, is supposed to be a temporary project—not the beginning of an entirely new life.
Then Nora discovers an antique hand-stitched sampler concealed inside a cedar trunk.
Its mismatched initials, reversed border, and nearly invisible name suggest that the sampler is more than a family keepsake. It may be the only surviving record of a child erased from Briar Creek’s history—and an inheritance quietly stolen decades ago.
Before Nora can uncover what her aunt knew, a local estate appraiser is found dead. He had been asking questions about the sampler, searching for a missing auction ledger, and meeting privately with someone determined to keep an old land transfer from being examined too closely.
Now Nora is following a trail of altered records, old letters, disputed property, and carefully guarded family secrets. Her unexpected ally is Eli Yoder, a reserved Amish widower and auction clerk who knows Briar Creek’s family histories almost as well as he knows when people are refusing to tell the truth.
Eli’s dry humor and steady presence make him useful. The grief he recognizes in Nora makes him dangerous in an entirely different way.
As suspicion spreads through the Amish farms, antique shops, auction houses, and polished tourist businesses surrounding Briar Creek, Nora realizes the sampler does not simply reveal what happened in the past. It threatens someone’s money, reputation, and future.
And the person who killed to keep its secret hidden may already know Nora has begun to unravel the pattern.
Readers will discover:
- A clever, emotionally grounded amateur sleuthwhose knowledge of printing, paper, handwriting, and design helps her notice what others overlook.
- An atmospheric Amish-country settingfilled with rural roads, estate auctions, quilt work, family businesses, and small-town secrets.
- A layered, low-gore cozy mystery involving an antique sampler, a hidden heir, altered records, and a disputed inheritance.
- A clean, chaste slow-burn romance between two widowed people rebuilding their lives through trust rather than instant attraction.
- Warm community characters and lightly witty dialogue without turning the mystery into slapstick.
- A satisfying standalone investigation that opens the door to more secrets from The Bell & Quill.
The Secret in the Sampler is the first novel in The Plain Truth Mysteries, a gentle Amish-adjacent cozy mystery series about old objects, hidden histories, rural grudges, and the truths people leave behind on paper and cloth.
Perfect for fans of Amanda Flower’s Assaulted Caramel, Laura Bradford’s Hearse and Buggy, and Vannetta Chapman’s Falling to Pieces.
About Abigail B. Hartwell
Short - Abigail B. Hartwell, aka Abby, writes warm Amish-country-adjacent cozy mysteries rooted in rural Ohio, where handmade clues, old family secrets, quiet faith, and plainspoken women bring buried truths into the light.
Long - Abigail B. Hartwell writes gentle Amish-adjacent cozy mysteries rooted in the small towns and wooded backroads of east-central Ohio. Though she is not Amish, she lives near Amish communities and draws inspiration from the region’s quiet rhythms, close-knit families, old stories, and rural traditions. She shares a modest home on five wooded acres with her long-haul truck driver husband. They have two grown daughters and three grandchildren. When she is not writing, Abigail enjoys church activities, family time, and the peaceful beauty of the Ohio countryside.
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