The Blackhollow Ledger
When Maren Voss steps off the ferry into the fog-shrouded coastal town of Blackhollow, she is looking for answers about her late father's investments , not a cold case, not a missing ledger, and certainly not a body found tangled in the kelp at low tide. Sergeant Rowan Calloway orders her off the investigation within the hour. Local doctor Tom Aldridge warns her that people who ask questions in Blackhollow tend to disappear into the salt marshes and never come back twice. But when Maren and journalist Dora Fenwick discover that Aldric Thorne, the patriarch of the town's wealthiest family, has been quietly buying up every share of the Blackhollow fishing cooperative through a paper trail that leads to a single unaccounted ledger, the truth begins to bleed through the fog. Lena Crane-Ashe, the reclusive town librarian, admits her late husband kept two sets of books , one for the council, one for himself. Peter Blackwell, the ferry's captain, claims he saw nothing the night a young clerk vanished from the harbor master's office. Margaret Crane, the woman Maren came to find, refuses to speak her dead husband's name aloud. Each revelation tightens the noose. Each ally proves more compromised than the last. And as a second storm rolls in from the open water, Maren realizes the ledger is not a record of the crime , it is the map to one still being committed. To expose the truth, she must choose between the safety of the ferry home and the risk of staying long enough to see Blackhollow finally surface what it has drowned.