Watermark

When a box of books from a dead man's estate arrives at The Margin Note, Cecily Mallory isn't expecting trouble. She's expecting old stock, faded invoices, and the particular quiet of sorting through what someone left behind.

What she finds is a coded notebook — and a trail that leads to a forged map, a London auction house, and a woman who is already dead.

The chart is an 18th-century survey of Bellhaven, attributed to a cartographer whose work commands serious money and certified by one of the most trusted specialists in the trade. The provenance is immaculate. The authentication is signed. And the woman who first noticed something wrong died before she could say so out loud.

Cecily's gift — the ability to read the echo left on old paper, the strongest impression a document ever absorbed — tells her the chart is wrong. Proving it, in a way that will hold up, is another matter entirely.

With DS Imogen Hale watching the official investigation and Ptolemy watching everything else, Cecily begins to pull at the threads of a fraud built carefully, across years, by someone with the credentials to make it invisible.

The paper doesn't lie. It just needs someone who knows how to read it.

Watermark is the third book in The Margin Notes Mysteries, a paranormal cozy mystery series set on the English coast.