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From the Next Generations Short Story Winner of "Khalil's Wall"
Nothing is as wicked (or mean) as massive small town malfeasance.
EMS Captain turned sleuth Brighid Doran suspects that all is not what it appears on the surface at The Branston Club — a swanky ski lodge being built in her rural Vermont town. While dodging danger and digging up dirt, Brighid faces the ire of small town politics, crooked cops, and an ever deepening hole of deceptions, all the while struggling to cope with the constant deployment of her wife Major Sarah (Sam) Ann Musgrave. With help from attorney Morgan Chadwick and a hovering FBI, Brighid must determine the truth of a scheme with the potential of defrauding her friends and neighbors of millions… but at what cost to her own relationships and where she calls home?
Stolen Mountain is part of The Trowbridge Vermont Series, which includes The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County (2024) and The Trowbridge Dispatch (2025), a collection of short stories.
"What I'm enjoying about [Stolen Mountain] so much is the small town flavor and all the familiar nods to local places and peoples and happenings, but there is a very intriguing plot in the background that is clearly fiction. Think big money coming into Vermont, there's the ski resort, the local police, there's fraud, all these interesting characters. It's really fun." — Lisa Sullivan, owner of Bartleby’s Books in Wilmington, VT. Vermont Edition, Vermont Public Radio
I.M. Aiken worked on ambulances off and on since the 1980s, starting in the Boston area where she was born and raised. She served one tour in Iraq as a civilian member of the US Army's 4th Infantry Division, and now lives in Vermont. Aiken is the 2026 Next Generations Short Story Winner of "Khalil's Wall."