Every Trick in the Book

Lila Wilkins has just been made a full-time literary agent at the Novel Idea Literary Agency in Inspiration Valley, North Carolina. She owns the home she wanted, her boyfriend is a police officer, and she loves the work. The town's Book and Author Festival, which the agency sponsors, should be a chance to find new writing talent.

Instead, Lila finds the body of an editor who looks strikingly like her. The resemblance is unsettling, and it gets worse when a promising young author is killed soon afterward.

Lila is convinced the two deaths are connected. With that hunch as her only lead, she sets out to identify whoever killed these women. The trail may run through a manuscript, where the clues she needs could be hidden.

This is a cozy-style mystery set in the publishing world, with an amateur sleuth who works with books and a small-town setting. It is part of the Novel Idea Mysteries series by Lucy Arlington. The tone mixes a personal threat with the puzzle of a literary clue hunt, so the stakes feel close to Lila herself.