The Marginalia Murder

Marin Ashworth came back to Cormorant Cove to reopen her late aunt’s bookshop, not to reopen an old wound the town had spent thirty years trying to forget.

The Inkwell & Anchor was supposed to be a fresh start — new paint, a warm café, a marmalade cat who ruled the window seat like it owed him rent.

And for one bright September afternoon, that’s exactly what it is.

Then Walter Kessler, a gentle regular with a lifelong passion for local history, turns up drowned off the town pier after a storm, and everyone agrees it was a tragic accident.

Everyone except Marin.

She remembers a strange, careful thing Walter said to her two nights before he died.

She remembers the canvas bag he always carried — the one that’s gone missing.

And when she finds an old ledger he left behind, its margins full of cryptic pencil marks, she starts pulling on a thread that leads straight back to a fisherman’s death three decades ago, a suspiciously generous land deal, and the town’s most powerful man.

With her sharp-tongued barista, a stubborn diner owner who never believed the official story, and a small-town detective who’s starting to trust her instincts more than his own case file,

Marin has to figure out who in Cormorant Cove is still protecting a thirty-year-old lie — before the tide takes something else it isn’t owed.

Warm, witty, and rooted in a coastal town readers will want to visit again and again, The Marginalia Murder is a fair-play mystery with real stakes, real charm, and a killer hiding in plain sight.

Some secrets don’t stay buried at sea forever. What will it cost Marin to bring this one to shore?