Alice Openshaw
Current Project
Now Querying!
Small town, big secrets.
Twenty-nine-year-old Penny Maclean is weary of school assemblies and chasing loose dogs as a police sergeant in Hadley, Maine. So when the popular wife of a local doctor is found shot to death behind their barn, Penny jumps at the chance to investigate.
She is startled by the many parallels she uncovers between the victim and herself. As Penny still struggles with a private trauma that upended her life years earlier, her intuition tells her the victim had a secret of her own. Peeling back the layers of the victim’s “charmed life” leads Penny from a picturesque New England farm to a domestic violence shelter, to the fringes of their small community, and, ultimately, into the dark side of rural Maine. Everyone is keeping secrets and Penny needs to unravel them all, even her own, to find the killer and put her own demons to rest.
Fans of Elena Taylor, Paula Munier, Melinda Leigh, and BritBox’s Karen Pirie will want to meet Sgt. Penny Maclean in ON THE KILLER’S TRAIL.
On The Killer’s Trail
About Me
I believe in the power of story. As a librarian and adult literacy teacher, I encouraged others to read and write. Now I have put my own words into print.
A New Englander born and bred, I spent my childhood on a dairy farm and my teen years in a college town. I earned a B.A. in Psychology from Middlebury College and an M.L.S. from Vanderbilt University.
For over twenty years, I lived in a small town in Maine where I raised three wonderful daughters and an assortment of animals on a hobby farm. I now live with my handsome husband and very handsome cat on the South Coast of Massachusetts.
I am a member of Sisters-in-Crime, Mystery Writers of America and the Cape Cod Writers Center.
More About the Book and Author
The inspiration for ON THE KILLER’S TRAIL came from the years I lived on a farm in rural Maine. It was a wonderful time raising a family with horses, goats, cats, rabbits, even a llama! Here I am holding an Angora goat kid. The characters and plot of the mystery evolved over the years, but it wasn’t until I moved to Massachusetts in 2020 that I finally words to paper. I hope you enjoy reading ON THE KILLER’S TRAIL as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Currently Drafting
A reclusive museum worker is killed in a hit-and-run accident the same night that a renowned author dies unexpectedly at his estate up the road in OVERLOOKED.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.”