The Marginalia Murder

In the fog-wrapped town of Dunmore Cove, Oregon, the most dangerous thing Willa Fenn expects to find between the shelves of her inherited bookshop is a misplaced semicolon. But when she unearths an unsigned, handwritten manuscript tucked behind a water-stained copy of Rebecca, its opening dedication stops her cold: For H.B., who stepped where she was told not to, and who will not step again.

Three weeks earlier, beloved schoolteacher Harriet Blume was found dead at the base of the Dunmore Cove lighthouse - officially ruled an accident. Nobody pushed her. Nobody had to.

Except the manuscript, written in an ink that hasn't quite dried, seems to know exactly what happened, and exactly what will happen next.

Willa is not a detective. She is a woman who has read ten thousand books and suspects this makes her dangerously qualified. Armed with an encyclopedic memory for fictional crime, a deeply loyal circle of eccentric regulars, and a refusal to believe that coincidence has such elegant prose style, she begins pulling on the threads - and finds that Dunmore Cove's most charming citizens are riddled with secrets that have been building, like sediment, for twenty years.

The manuscript keeps updating. The killer knows Willa is reading.

The Marginalia Murders is a slow-burning, fog-soaked debut cozy mystery for readers who take their tea strong, their sentences longer, and their small-town secrets very, very seriously.