★ A Launch Pad 2024 Prose Competition Top 50 Finalist! But That Doesn't Really Mean Anything! ★

Brilliant. Ambitious. A great detective. Matilda Garrigan is none of these in The Matildas, a quirky, hilarious mystery with duplicates, duplicity, and an amateur sleuth in way over her head.

Tiny book publisher Mitotic Press takes novels from one Earth and publishes them on a parallel Earth, thanks to a portal in a basement conference room. They're a team of book thieves with a pretty sweet (and very secret) business--until someone anonymously threatens to reveal Mitotic's portal to both Earths.

Matilda Garrigan quit her dream job at Mitotic Press after she was too late returning from a business trip to the other Earth to prevent her girlfriend's death. Mattie's good at running away from her problems, and she's certainly no detective, but when Mitotic comes calling, she reluctantly channels her inner Nancy Drew to find out who's behind the threat.

Mattie's investigation leads nowhere--and, predictably, she gives up--but when more clues are found and bodies start piling up, Mattie realizes that the mastermind can only be--

--someone who's already dead.

To keep Mitotic's portal a secret--and finally tell the perfect woman how she really feels--Mattie faces angry ex-lovers, terrible music, identical killers from multiple Earths, and a mystery that grows weirder by the day.