Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Anna deWhal
Series: Cedar Harbor Cozy Mysteries—Book 9 of 12
The Book:
Emma Chandler has lived in Cedar Harbor long enough to know how the town handles bad news: quickly, kindly, and in a way that lets everyone get back to work by Monday. So when Walt Greaves is found dead on the boards near the working dock, the verdict arrives almost before he does. Slippery footing. An old man. An unlucky evening. Nobody argues.
What bothers Emma is the box. Walt kept a collection of old harbor objects, and in the last stretch of his life he had gone to real trouble to keep it from becoming public—which is a strange amount of effort to spend on things the water had already finished with. With antiques expert Ollie Bradshaw, Detective Ethan Carter, and one very patient dog, Emma starts pulling on that thread. The question isn't who Walt Greaves was. It's what he was still holding onto, and who else knew he had it.
The trail is paper and rust and photographs: records that don't line up, metal damaged before it ever went in the water, pictures nobody meant to keep. It runs back to a fire decades old, to the man the town assigned the blame to and who is not around to answer for it, and to a second boat that someone with money and standing has spent a very long time keeping off the record. Old harbor glass is only harmless because the water wore the edges down. Nothing wore the edges off this.
Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (21 ratings)
“A dead man on the dock, a box of harbor junk he’d worked hard to keep private, and a fire the town assigned blame for decades ago and never looked at twice. If your kind of cozy does its detecting in county records and old photographs, Emma Chandler works that way on purpose.”
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