When document conservator Nora Ashford takes a position at a museum in Rostock, Germany, she's looking for quiet work and a safe distance from the complications of home. The medieval manuscripts need her careful attention, and the old monastery on the Baltic coast asks nothing of her but patience and steady hands.

Then a beloved retired midwife is found dead at the city's waterfront, and Nora notices something no one else has — strange markings in the margins of the centuries-old parish registers she's been restoring. Markings that seem connected to a pattern the midwife had been quietly investigating for years.

As Nora follows the trail from archive rooms to coastal clinics, from a windswept Baltic beach to the ancient forest that has sheltered Rostock since before the city had a name, she finds herself drawn into a community that is warmer, stranger, and far older than she expected. The investigation asks more of her than professional skill — it asks her to look closely at a place that has been keeping its own records, in its own language, for a very long time.

The Changeling's Garden is part of the Good Neighbors Mysteries, a cozy mystery series set in real towns where ordinary lives, close-knit communities, and well-kept local histories lead to mysteries with more beneath the surface than first meets the eye. Warm, thoughtful, and gently surprising, these are stories about place, connection, and the neighbors who make a town what it is.

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