The Wrecker's Share
By Sylvie Marsh
Warm
Some records are made to outlast the person who kept them.
Bookshop owner Cecily Mallory knows old paper the way other people know faces — which is how she notices, within days of elderly historian Conal Stredwick's fatal fall, that someone has quietly doctored thirty years of his meticulous cave logbooks.
The official version says accident. Cecily's shop cat, Ptolemy, who has never once said a word and somehow always says exactly enough, disagrees.
What starts as one wrong tide entry unravels into a stolen research career, a fraudulent salvage claim, and a scientific paper buried since 1887 — along with the reason it was buried. Cecily has the eye. Detective Sergeant Hale has the badge. Between them, and whatever Ptolemy chooses to show them, they might have enough to finally let a dead man's careful, patient truth stand.
Book 4 in the Margin Note Mysteries — cozy crime with a coastal chill.
