The Lydia Knot

At Camp Latchkey, nostalgia is part of the package.

The former Camp Buttercup has been reinvented as a summer camp for Gen X adults, complete with friendship bracelets, canoe lessons, campfire songs, cassette-tape socials, and absolutely no required trust falls before coffee.

For arts-and-crafts coordinator Tracy Callahan, returning to camp should be a second chance at joy. She was once an awkward kid at Camp Buttercup, happiest with embroidery floss in her pocket and a kind young photography counselor named Monroe Bond watching out for her like a big brother.

But when Tracy finds a faded friendship bracelet buried near the canoe dock, looped around something that should never have been there, the camp's carefully packaged nostalgia begins to unravel.

Thirty years ago, fifteen-year-old Lydia Vale vanished after a cruel campfire prank. Everyone said she ran away.

Tracy isn't so sure.

With Monroe's old photographs, a missing sketchbook, a repaired canoe rack, and a bracelet pattern only Lydia made quite that way, Tracy follows a trail of knots back to the summer of 1995, where friendship, jealousy, and one pretty lie changed everything.

Because Lydia didn't run.

And someone at Camp Latchkey has spent thirty years making sure no one proved it.

The Lydia Knot is a nostalgic cozy mystery filled with campfire secrets, handmade clues, old friendships, and a gentle amateur sleuth determined to untangle the truth.