The Drowned Ledger
When Margot Ellison's rental sedan rolls through the fog into Cormorant , population 1,140 , she is returning to the one place she swore she would never see again. Her ex-husband Arthur's family still works the docks, the Fisk and Voss clans still trade in quiet influence, and Deputy Tom Brack still patrols a town that prefers its secrets kept below the tide line. But secrets have a way of surfacing in Cormorant, and the tide is coming in. A waterlogged ledger washes onto the marsh near Sam Calloway's bait shop, its pages swollen into pulp but its columns still legible. Local physician Dr. Lena Marchetti recognizes what the numbers could mean. So does Edith Harlan, the old harbor keeper who has kept her mouth shut since before Margot was born. Nora Fisk and her husband Gerald, pillars of the town for decades, are watching the news with mounting dread. Callum Voss has already started moving money. And when the man who pulled the ledger from the water is found drowned in the harbor, the investigation stops being about a book and starts being about who gets to keep the past buried. Margot did not come back for this. She came back to settle an estate, sell a house, and leave. But someone is still willing to drown the evidence, and the next name on the ledger might be hers. With the ferry docked for the season, the fog closing in, and the bodies of two old families closing ranks, she has until the storm breaks to uncover what Cormorant has killed to protect , or become the third secret the town takes to its grave.