The Secret in the Sampler book tour is through Great Escapes Virtual Book Tours and includes a fun character interview and a giveaway. Check it out below, share, comment, follow.
Book Details
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 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.
Social Media Links
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/abigailbhartwellauthor/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AbigailBHartwell
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
TOUR PARTICIPANTS
August 18 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT
August 18 – The Avid Reader – REVIEW
August 19 – Jody’s Bookish Haven – SPOTLIGHT
August 19 – Reading, Writing & Stitch-Metic – AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 20 – Boys’ Mom Reads! – SPOTLIGHT
August 20 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT
August 21 – Christy’s Cozy Corners – REVIEW, CHARACTER GUEST POST
August 21 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – SPOTLIGHT
August 22 – Ruff Drafts – SPOTLIGHT
August 22 – Sarah Can’t Stop Reading Books – REVIEW
August 23 – Sarcastically Yours, Jen – SPOTLIGHT
August 23 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT
August 24 – StoreyBook Reviews – CHARACTER GUEST POST
August 25 – Cozy Up With Kathy – REVIEW, AUTHOR INTERVIEW
August 26 – Ascroft, eh? – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
August 27 – Salty Inspirations – AUTHOR GUEST POST
August 28 – Sarandipity’s – CHARACTER INTERVIEW
August 28 – Book HookUp – REVIEW
August 29 – Romance Novel Giveaways – SPOTLIGHT
Sarandipity’s Character Interview with Nora Bell
1. Describe yourself.
I am Nora Bell, thirty-nine, widowed, and the somewhat reluctant owner of The Bell & Quill, an old letterpress and stationery shop in Briar Creek, Ohio.
Before returning here, I lived in Columbus and worked as a freelance graphic designer and part-time art teacher. That means I can identify poor spacing at twenty paces, calm a classroom armed with paint, and recognize when a client wants “something elegant” but has brought me a sample printed in metallic purple.
People sometimes mistake my quietness for shyness. It is not. I simply prefer to listen until everyone has finished improving upon the truth.
I am observant, private, persistent, and more sentimental than I like others to know. I also have a mildly unreasonable need to straighten stacks of paper until their edges align. There are worse character flaws.
2. What makes you laugh?
Unexpected humor.
Maeve Hartley makes me laugh because she can deliver an insult inside an offer of pie and leave the recipient feeling grateful. Eli Yoder makes me laugh because he says very little, then slips in one dry observation when I have stopped expecting it. His jokes are so restrained that they occasionally require authentication.
Daniel, my late husband. made me laugh easily. After he died, laughter became complicated. I could still enjoy something and miss him in the same moment. It took me time to understand that one feeling did not cancel the other.
I also find misplaced dignity amusing. A person who has just been caught lying will often become extremely concerned about manners. Apparently, etiquette is the final shelter of the badly cornered.
3. Are you afraid of anything?
Yes, although most of my fears would be inconvenient to list during an emergency.
I am afraid of becoming so accustomed to loss that I stop allowing myself to care deeply about anything new. Grief can make caution feel intelligent. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is merely fear wearing sensible shoes.
I am also afraid of exposing the truth badly. A hidden record may prove fraud or clear an innocent person, but it can also contain private pain that belongs to someone else. Finding a secret does not automatically make me the proper person to announce it.
As for physical danger, I would prefer not to be followed through a dark shop, threatened over an old document, or placed near anyone who considers poison an efficient solution to an inheritance dispute. I do not think those preferences qualify as cowardice.
4. Do you have a special talent or gift?
I can read the physical history of printed things.
Paper records more than words. Its fibers, edges, surface, discoloration, and weight can reveal when it was made or how it has been handled. Letterpress type leaves an impression. Modern toner sits differently. Ink ages unevenly. Labels lift. Erasures thin the page. A forged date may be convincing until you notice that the typeface did not exist when the document was supposedly created.
I also notice visual relationships quickly. Give me six documents, and I will usually see which margin, signature, ornament, or line of spacing does not belong.
This is not supernatural. It is training, attention, and years of being professionally irritated by careless design.
5. Do you have a secret?
I judge people by their font choices.
I know this is unfair. I am trying to improve.
Comic Sans suggests either innocence or hostility. Excessive script usually means someone wants a wedding invitation to resemble a royal decree. Tiny formal lettering indicates a person has confused elegance with making the grandparents find a magnifying glass.
I do not make important decisions solely on this basis.
Usually.
6. Tell us about your family.
The Bell family has a habit of leaving behind objects instead of explanations.
My paternal great-grandmother, Abigail Bell, founded The Bell & Quill in 1943. My father’s older sister, Lenora, began helping there as a teenager and eventually took over the business. She lived in the apartment above the shop until her death at seventy following a stroke and brief illness.
Aunt Lenora remembered every birthday and apparently every private printing job completed in Briar Creek for half a century. What she did not remember was to leave me a simple explanation of what was hidden in her back room.
My husband was Daniel Smyth. I kept my own surname when we married, which he accepted without turning it into a referendum on civilization. Daniel died suddenly two years before I returned to Briar Creek. Our marriage was loving, imperfect, ordinary in the best way, and entirely ours.
My close friend Marisol Vega, a former teaching colleague in Columbus, is the person who remembers who I was before grief and Briar Creek rearranged my life. Family is not always determined by a genealogy chart. Sometimes it is the person who knows when you are pretending to be okay, but refuses to believe the obvious lie.
7. Who is the most important person in your life?
Daniel remains the most important person in the life I had before Briar Creek. Death does not reduce a marriage to a completed chapter simply because other people are ready to turn the page.
Among the living, I would prefer not to answer too quickly.
There is a certain auction clerk who has become important despite possessing an alarming commitment to careful silence. He has the unsettling habit of understanding what I mean before I have decided whether to say it.
That’s enough for the record. Maeve Hartley might read this.
8. What is your most embarrassing moment?
Eli discovered that I talk to the letterpress.
In my defense, the Chandler & Price press has a definite personality. It jams when criticized, makes judgmental noises during emotional conversations, and appears to respond better to negotiation than force.
When Eli asked whether I spoke to it, I denied it. He waited.
I admitted I had done it once.
He continued waiting.
I revised the number to twice.
The humiliating part was not being caught. It was that Eli looked at the machine and agreed that it appeared judgmental. There are very few dignified responses when another person calmly accepts your argument with industrial equipment.
9. What do you do for fun?
My idea of fun may not survive comparison with the general population.
I like working with paper when no client is waiting and nothing needs to be solved. I enjoy choosing a typeface, mixing ink, experimenting with spacing, and producing something beautiful that exists simply because someone took the time to make it properly.
I collect small paper samples and study old printing techniques. I like wandering through stationery shops, used bookstores, antique stores, and estate sales when nobody has recently died under suspicious circumstances. That last qualification has become necessary.
I also enjoy talking with Marisol, walking when the weather is tolerable, and drinking tea while it is still hot. I have achieved two of those things with reasonable consistency.
10. If you could change anything about your life, what would it be?
I would have asked Aunt Lenora better questions while she was alive.
I knew her as my aunt: the woman who sent birthday cards, corrected grammar without apology, and expected people to understand instructions she had not actually given. I did not understand the weight of the work she performed at The Bell & Quill or how many people had trusted her with unfinished pieces of their lives.
Now I know her through ledgers, proof sheets, private notes, and warnings hidden beside old fabric. Records can tell me what she did. They cannot let me ask why.
I would also have recognized sooner that continuing to live does not betray the person who died. Daniel would not have wanted grief to become the only thing I remained loyal to.
11. Tell me about your author.
Abby appears to believe that no drawer should contain only what it claims to contain.
She writes mysteries built around ordinary objects: samplers, invitations, ledgers, labels, hymnbooks, maps, and other items reasonable people might examine without immediately discovering fraud. She does not seem interested in reasonable people.
She treats Briar Creek as a real community rather than a decorative backdrop. The Amish characters have individual beliefs, tempers, loyalties, mistakes, and private concerns. The town’s tourist businesses are not automatically villainous, although Abigail is understandably suspicious of anyone who sells “authentic simplicity” in a gift basket.
She also believes truth should restore dignity rather than turn another person’s suffering into entertainment. I respect that.
12. Do you like the way she writes you?
Mostly.
Abby allows me to be competent without making me infallible. I am observant, but I overlook things. I am persistent, but I can push too hard. I care about justice, but I have to learn that uncovering a private history does not give me ownership of it.
She does not make grief disappear because the mystery has been solved. She also does not treat widowhood as the end of my emotional life. Both choices seem fair.
I object to the number of times she allows readers access to thoughts I would never express aloud. In particular, she records every occasion when I notice Eli’s hands, voice, expression, or proximity. This is an invasion of privacy disguised as character development.
Still, she has not made me helpless, adorable, or fearless. She lets me be angry, uncertain, dryly amused, occasionally wrong, and capable of changing my mind without surrendering it.
So yes, I like the way she writes me.
I reserve the right to revise that answer after seeing what she puts in the next drawer
Giveaway
Prize – 5 Digital Copies of The Secret in the Sampler: A Plain Truth Mystery by Abigail B. Hartwell- Free novelette for email list sign-up (in progress)
