Some inherit bookshops. Nora Vale inherits a locked-room mystery—with a ghost in the margins.
Former rare-book cataloger Nora Vale arrives in rain-soaked Hallowmere Harbor, Maine, to take over The Lantern & Quill, the family bookshop she never expected to own. The shelves are charming, the debts are very real, and the building has a few quirks no inspection report could explain: a front bell that rings when no one enters, a tide clock that runs ahead, and an archive full of old dead letters no one was meant to read.
Then a property consultant is found dead in the shop’s locked archive.
With suspicion settling over Nora and the future of The Lantern & Quill at stake, she begins untangling a mystery rooted in family secrets, a long-ago lighthouse fire, and messages left behind by the harbor’s dead. Her most unlikely source is Ephraim Quill, a prickly ghost printer from the 1890s, who offers clues in fragments—and never quite enough of them.
As Nora sorts truth from rumor, and history from haunting, she’ll have to decide who in Hallowmere Harbor can be trusted before another secret is buried for good.