This summer, Nine Muses Books will publish a new full-length Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective novel entitled The Minuscule Monk. This is the first novel-length Lizzie adventure and will be published as both a print book and an e-book.
Now you can read the first two chapters which have been published exclusively in The Literary Hatchet #11. The magazine is available from PearTree Press in a free digital downloadable edition as well as a print edition. This is your chance to get a head start on the new adventures of Lizzie Borden, the most excellent girl detective of Fall River.
When a dead body mysteriously appears in the basement of her father’s furniture store, 15 year-old Lizzie Andrew Borden immediately takes on the case. Accompanied by an eccentric millionaire who campaigns to extend the vote to animals; a Boston terrier trained to sniff out crooked politicians; and a boy detective who believes the entire universe to be inside his own head, Lizzie follows a trail of taxidermy tools and Civil War bushwhackers to the Minuscule Monk, a legendary gunslinger whose mummified body will bring a punter’s pot to anyone who can deliver it to the New York gangster who has been hunting the Monk for decades. With such high stakes, everyone has a motive for murder, yet everyone seems innocent. Or perhaps, as Lizzie suspects after attending a dinner party with non-existent food and meeting a horse that has turned into its opposite, none of it is even real.
Lizzie Borden, the Girl Detective of Fall River, is at her most spirited in The Minuscule Monk, a comic mystery that paints a portrait of Fall River at the height of its splendor and its most infamous citizen at the start of her most excellent career.
