Murder Without a Duck: A Simpato Mystery

In Simpato, California, the wine flows, the gossip spreads, and murder is always just around the corner.

Recently divorced and temporarily suspended from practicing law, Sal DeVine is desperate for a fresh start. She retreats to her late parents’ home in the small Northern California town of Simpato, hoping for a little peace, privacy, and time to figure out what comes next.

But Simpato has other plans.

In a town where everyone knows everyone’s business—and the locals seem to know far more about Sal than she knows about them—keeping a low profile proves impossible. Then a murder occurs just minutes from where Sal is hiking, plunging her into a dangerous web of long-buried secrets, small-town rivalries, and suspicious characters.

As Sal digs deeper, she begins to suspect that the town’s secrets may hold answers to a mystery much closer to home: the unexplained deaths of her parents years earlier.

With wine flowing, gossip flying, ducks roaming, and nuns selling cannabis cookies, Simpato is anything but ordinary. Sal will need all her legal instincts, determination, and wit to uncover the truth—before she becomes the next victim.

Welcome to Simpato, where murder is serious business, but almost nothing else is.

Murder Without a Duck is the first installment in Claudia H. Long’s Simpato Mystery Series, a delightful blend of small-town intrigue, eccentric characters, family secrets, and plenty of terrible duck puns.

About the Author

Claudia Hagadus Long is the author of seven novels, including the deeply emotional mystery series featuring Zara and Lilly: Nine Tenths of the Law and Our Lying Kin. Her books span centuries and topics, including the poetry of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (Josefina's Sin), the Hidden Jews of Mexico during the Inquisition (The Duel for Consuelo), women in the mining industry in 1753 (Chains of Silver), women in the labor movement in 1920s San Francisco (The Harlot's Pen), and the legacy of inherited trauma as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her humorous mysteries are “sisters-books, family scandals with a mystery flowing through them.”