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The Secret in the Sampler: A Plain Truth Mystery
by Abigail B. Hartwell
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About The Secret in the Sampler
The Secret in the Sampler: A Plain Truth Mystery
Amish Adjacent Cozy Mystery with Slow-Burn Romance
1st in Series
Setting - Ohio Publisher : Plain Truth Press
Publication date : May 31, 2026
Print length : 358 pages
Digital ASIN : B0GX372D82
Paperback Coming Soon!
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 sleuth whose knowledge of printing, paper, handwriting, and design helps her notice what others overlook.
- An atmospheric Amish-country setting filled 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.
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EXCERPT:
Nora moved the packet of letters aside without opening it. Beneath the linens was another layer of tissue, more brittle, folded around something flat. She touched it and felt fabric beneath.
Not quilt batting. Not linens.
Embroidery.
She lifted the bundle carefully and set it on the floor between them. The tissue sighed as she unfolded it.
A sampler emerged in muted colors, cream linen browned with age, stitched borders, tiny flowers, a verse from Scripture, initials placed at odd intervals, and a date worked in thread so faded she had to bend close to read it.
Rain tapped the glass. Somewhere in the shop, water dripped into a bucket with slow, patient plinks.
Nora forgot to make a joke.
The sampler was beautiful in a restrained, deliberate way. Not showy. Not decorative only. The stitches were small and even, though one side of the border seemed wrong. Reversed, perhaps. Turned inward where the others opened out. Near the lower right corner, a set of initials had been worked in pale thread almost the same color as the ground cloth.
Nora traced the air above them without touching.
“A.K.,” she whispered.
Eli did not answer.
She looked up.
He was staring at the sampler.
“You recognize the initials,” she said.
“I recognize the name they could be.”
“Keim?”
His jaw tightened.
“That careful silence again,” Nora said.
“This is not my history to speak first.”
“No, it’s my aunt’s trunk in my shop.”
“It may be more than that.”
“Everything in Briar Creek seems to be more than that.”
“Yes.”
The simple agreement irritated her. It also steadied her, which was inconvenient.
Nora lifted the last fold of tissue.
A slip of paper slid free and landed face down on the floor.
Eli saw it at the same moment she did.
Neither moved for half a second.
Then Nora picked it up.
The handwriting struck her before the words did. Aunt Lenora’s hand. Firm, slanted, precise, with the capital D shaped like a half-open door. Nora had seen it on birthday cards, recipe notes, Christmas labels, and once on a stern letter to a utility company that had overcharged her by twelve dollars and learned regret.
She turned the note over.
Do not sell until the initials are understood.
Nora read it once.
Then again.
The words seemed to draw the cold from the brick walls and lay it directly along her spine.
Eli rose slowly.
“What does it say?” he asked.
Nora held the note out.
He did not take it. He leaned close enough to read, hands at his sides, careful even now not to claim what was not his.
His face changed.
Not much. Eli Yoder did not appear to be a man who allowed his face to conduct town meetings. But the stillness in him sharpened.
“You know something,” Nora said.
“I know enough to say you should not show that to Vernon Pike.”
“The appraiser?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Eli looked at the sampler, then the trunk, then the locked cabinet across the room.
“Because Vernon admires old things most when someone else does not understand their value.”
“You still have not told me why Vernon matters.”
“It is the answer I can give now.”
Nora stood, the note trembling slightly in her hand. She disliked the trembling. Her body had taken liberties since Daniel died, expressing things before she had approved them.
Outside, the rain thickened, turning the windows silver. The shop lights hummed overhead. The sampler lay between them like something quiet that had waited years to be found and had not forgiven anyone for taking so long.
Nora looked again at Aunt Lenora’s note.
Do not sell until the initials are understood.
Aunt Lenora had not left her a keepsake.
She had left her a warning.
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AUTHOR GUEST POST
A Different Kind of Impression: The
Difference Between
a Letterpress and a Printing Press
People often use letterpress and printing press as though the terms mean the same thing. They do not, although the confusion is understandable. A letterpress is a printing press, but a printing press is not necessarily a letterpress. That is the cleanest distinction, and perhaps the only clean thing one can say about printing once ink, oil, paper dust, and human beings become involved.
A printing press is the broad category. It is any machine designed to reproduce words or images by bringing an inked or prepared image surface into controlled contact with paper or another material. Across history, that category has included wooden screw presses, iron hand presses, platen presses, cylinder presses, lithographic presses, rotary machines, and offset presses.
A letterpress is one particular method within that larger family. It prints from a raised surface. Individual pieces of metal or wood type, an engraved block, or a modern relief plate carry the image above the surrounding surface. Ink touches those raised areas, and the press forces paper against them. The design transfers directly to the sheet.
That raised surface is the heart of letterpress printing. If I lock movable type into a form, ink it, and press cotton paper against it on the Chandler & Price machine at The Bell & Quill, I am using a letterpress. The pressure may leave a slight impression in the paper. Modern customers tend to admire that impression. Earlier commercial printers usually sought a clean image without driving the type deeply into the sheet, because type was expensive and crushing it for decorative enthusiasm was not considered good workmanship.
The history of the printing press is broader than the history of letterpress, although the two begin closely entwined in Europe. Printing from carved woodblocks had existed in East Asia for centuries. In fifteenth-century Europe, Johannes Gutenberg brought together movable metal type, suitable ink, type casting, and a press mechanism into a practical system for producing books. The exact design of his machine is unknown, but historians believe it was probably a wooden screw press operated by a lever. The screw-and-platen arrangement remained fundamental to type-printing presses for centuries.
Those early machines were letterpresses because they pressed paper against raised, inked type. Over time, printing presses became stronger and faster. Wooden frames gave way to iron. Lever mechanisms improved pressure. Cylinder presses carried sheets over flat forms of type, and rotary presses eventually printed from curved plates at speeds an old hand printer might have regarded as both miraculous and morally suspicious.
By the nineteenth century, small platen job presses became common in American printing offices. They were designed for short commercial work such as tickets, handbills, letterheads, notices, cards, and labels. Chandler & Price, founded in Cleveland in 1881, became one of the best-known American manufacturers of these machines. The press at The Bell & Quill belongs to that tradition. It is a compact job press designed to bring an inked form and a flat platen together repeatedly and efficiently.
Meanwhile, the larger category of printing presses kept expanding. Lithographic presses print from a flat surface rather than raised type. Offset presses transfer an image from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to paper. Rotary newspaper presses use cylinders and rolls of paper for enormous production runs. These are printing presses, but they are not letterpresses.
That distinction matters when considering an Amish community.
The sentimental explanation would be that letterpress is appropriate because the Amish reject modern machinery and prefer everything old. It is also wrong. Amish communities do not all follow identical rules, and they do not reject technology simply because it is new. They assess tools according to local church standards and the likely effect on family, humility, independence, and community life. Many Old Order groups reject electricity from public utility lines while permitting selected technologies powered by batteries, generators, compressed air, or other locally controlled sources.
A treadle-powered or mechanically adapted letterpress can fit that approach. It can operate without connection to the electrical grid. It is durable, understandable, repairable, and suited to modest local production. It does not require a computer network, online ordering, or dependence on a distant commercial printer. None of those things is automatically forbidden, but they can shift control away from the community.
Letterpress is also well matched to the printed needs of a rural Amish district: auction bills, school-benefit notices, business cards, jar labels, seed packets, memorial cards, wedding invitations, and simple stationery. Platen job presses were created precisely for neighborhood printers producing short-run local work.
At The Bell & Quill, that scale matters. Aunt Lenora served both the Englisch town and nearby Amish families by printing auction flyers, recipe cards, memorial programs, church bulletins, wedding invitations, and private stationery. The shop’s Chandler & Price press and drawers of movable type make the business local, deliberate, and personal. A customer can stand at the counter, settle the wording, choose the paper, and know who will handle the names and dates.
Letterpress is therefore not appropriate because Amish people belong to the past. They do not. It is appropriate because the machine can support local control, limited scale, practical independence, repair rather than replacement, and careful work performed by someone accountable to the customer.
A printing press is the larger invention: any of many machines developed to reproduce text and images. A letterpress is one branch of that invention, defined by raised, inked forms pressed against a surface.
The difference is technical, but it is also philosophical. A high-speed press is built to make many copies quickly and consistently. A letterpress asks the operator to remain close to every part of the work: the type, the ink, the pressure, the paper, and the person whose name is being printed. In Briar Creek, names have consequences. I prefer to keep my hands near the machinery.
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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.
Social Media Links:
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Website https://abigailbhartwell.wixsite.com/amish-cozy-mysteries
Amazon https://www.amazon.com/stores/Abigail-B.-Hartwell/author/B0H71WD53Y
Purchase Links – Amazon Book Amazon Series
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