Two Chilling Mysteries From Local Authors

Two authors with strong Chatham connections have just released atmospheric murder mysteries perfect for this time of year as the weather chills and the nights lengthen.

 Chatham summer resident Bailey Seybolt’s gripping debut novel is “Coram House” (Atria Books, 2025).

 Set in Burlington, Vt., it revolves around a bestselling true crime writer, Alex Kelley, who has suffered a searing and humiliating professional setback. When she’s given a chance to ghostwrite another true crime story, she jumps at it and moves from Brooklyn to a grungy apartment in a purple house in snowy, cold Burlington — a city she is as yet unacquainted with. Immediately upon her arrival, Alex receives boxes of files from the lawyer for whom she is ghostwriting the book and begins her obsessive research.

 Looming over the city — literally and figuratively — is a now-defunct orphanage called Coram House. In the late 1980s, the adults who once lived in Coram House sued the Catholic church for the horrific abuse they suffered as children. When Alex visits Coram House, it is being remodeled into upscale, lakefront housing. Still, the old building, where children were referred to as numbers and locked in the attic, is creepy. Really creepy.

 “It was a building that led me to the story, actually,” Seybolt said in an email interview last week. “When I first moved to Vermont, I lived near an imposing brick building. It stood on a hill with the lake behind it like a backdrop. It was quite beautiful, but also a little spooky since it was clearly abandoned, blocked off behind a chain link fence. I got curious and so I Googled it, and found out that the building was once St. Joseph’s Orphanage. Once I started to learn more, I was fully down the rabbit hole.”

 St. Joseph’s was, yes, a real place that operated from 1854 to 1974. Children were abused there. The more Seybolt learned about the abuse, the more she wondered how it could happen and, just as importantly, what justice might look like.

 Alex quickly latches onto the story of a boy, Tommy, who disappeared from Coram House in 1968. Did he run away as the nuns said? Or did he drown? The testimony of the survivors is contradictory, and a key witness is dead. As Alex investigates, more people die.

 Seybolt began writing “Coram House” during the pandemic with two small children at home. But she realized that “you can accomplish a lot in bite-sized pieces: a page here, a sentence there.” It took her nearly three years to finish the book. She is currently writing a mystery set in Maine but “very much informed by my summers in Chatham.”

Growing up in New York City, Seybolt spent her summers in Chatham in a house on Stage Harbor that first belonged to her grandparents and now belongs to her parents, Peggy and Crossan Seybolt.

 She still loves to visit, “especially in the off-season. Nothing brings me back to my childhood quite like the smell of the ocean and the way the light looks on the beach in September.”

 Seybolt’s Chatham-inspired work-in-progress is about a woman who returns to the island community where she spent her summers. When a childhood friend dies, she becomes convinced it’s not an accident, and that the murder stemmed from the events of a past summer. “I guess people trying, and failing, to escape their past is a theme with me,” Seybolt says.

 “I love the constraints of writing in the mystery genre,” she adds. “Usually there’s a body or a crime, and you know that you’ll have a solution — hopefully one that feels both surprising and inevitable to the reader — by the end of the book.”

 Seybolt will sign “Coram House” on Friday, Nov. 28 from 2 to 4 p.m. at Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore in Chatham.

 John Poignand has just released “The Counterfeit Corpse” (2025). 

 Poignand, a native of England who moved to Chatham in 1997, joined the Chatham Memoirs Group that meets for two hours every Friday at the Eldredge Public Library. Today, Poignand runs the memoir group.

 Since publishing his first sci-fi thriller “Escape” in 2013, Poignand has proven himself a prolific writer. He has published poems, short stories, and a memoir of surviving prostate cancer called “Light in the Dark.”

 “The Counterfeit Corpse” opens in the 1950s in post-war Britain. We soon meet Detective Inspector Michael Ward of England’s Special Crimes Division. Ward has just been injured and is waking up in the hospital after a shoot-out. Ward next becomes embroiled in a gruesome case — a headless body is found in a small Yorkshire town, displayed on the war monument. Ward calls this staged setup a “counterfeit corpse” meant to cover up something darker.

 Poignand’s own childhood in wartime England “in many ways forms the background for some of the book,” he says. “I lived in an orphanage with my sister until I was 6, and then we moved back to London in early 1943, just in time to be evacuated and returned to experience the Blitz, the doodlebugs, and V2s.” Poignand will speak to the Chatham Men’s Club about his book on Feb. 13.

 “The Counterfeit Corpse” is available at Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore.