“I did most of the research for my latest novel in Shropshire County, in England’s West Midlands.”

The hotel conference room at a Pacific Northwest writers conference was filled with mystery writers and Elizabeth George fans. I hadn’t spent much time with the mystery genre since the Agatha Christie novels I read in high school to avoid math homework, but the British Inspector Lynley mysteries were a television favorite.

I glanced up from my notes to take in what George, an American, was telling us about her research in Ludlow, a Shropshire village I had visited the year before. I made a note of the book title: The Punishment She Deserves.

One year before the writer’s conference, I stayed with my friend, Rosemary, for the last time at her Victorian cottage in Shrewsbury, Shropshire County. At a picnic table in a neighborhood community garden, we reminisced about my first visit to England and a blustery Pooh Bear Sunday when Rosemary drove her lodger and me to Church Stretton to hike up the Long Mynd in the Shropshire Hills.

We climbed the paved road along the edge of the high ground that dropped into the distant green Carding Mill Valley. At some invisible division between earthly nature and magic, we stepped into heavy snowfall. The wet flakes began to cover the moorland plateau like luxury ermine draped over the shoulders of a village dweller.

Rosemary led us off of the pavement onto rustic stone paths that meandered through the heath. She stopped us to point to a herd of wild ponies grazing below us on the vegetation that poked through the snow accumulating on the hillside. They were a group of eight or ten shaggy, unkempt teenagers and older ponies of varying colors and sizes, who looked up in unison at our approach. A few courageous leaders lowered their heads again, my signal to move in slowly. I stood with them, a part of the herd. When I turned to leave, a long while had passed and Rosemary waited, uncharacteristically patient, alone at the top of the hill. Grinning.

Rosemary died a few weeks before the conference of the brain tumor she endured for 15 months. Months later, when the popular audiobook finally entered my Libby library queue, I listened to The Punishment She Deserves.

As I had hoped she would, Elizabeth George introduced the Long Mynd, a setting pivotal to the climax of her story. George didn’t mention the ponies, but I saw them, and Rosemary.

When the Dead Speak