Drafts & Deadlights

Someone wrote the murder in her voice.

Mystery novelist Frannie Wexler has built a careful life inside Black Reef Light-alone, disciplined, and far enough above Morrow Cove to keep the town at a manageable distance.

Then an anonymous package arrives at the lighthouse.

Inside is a manuscript.
It is written in a voice disturbingly close to her own.
It describes a murder in the fog-cistern beneath Black Reef Light.
And the victim is a man Frannie spoke to the night before.

By dawn, the body is there.

Now Frannie is trapped inside a story someone else has written for her-one that turns her home into a crime scene, her profession into evidence, and her own literary instincts into the very thing she can no longer trust. As the Lantern Night festival gathers around the harbor and the town begins deciding what role Frannie plays in the death, she starts following the manuscript the way she would follow a flawed draft: line by line, clue by clue, looking for the place where imitation gives way to intent.

What she finds leads through Morrow Cove's reading room, its literary festival, its private loyalties, and the quiet machinery of a town that knows how to preserve its image. Because this was never just a stunt, and never just fan obsession. Someone local knew her work well enough to borrow it-and knew the town well enough to turn fiction into a method.

Drafts & Deadlights is an atmospheric coastal mystery for readers who love secluded lighthouses, intelligent women sleuths, literary intrigue, small-town secrets, and puzzles built around books, archives, and the dangerous difference between a public voice and a private one.

Open the manuscript. Enter the lighthouse. But don't assume the person telling the story wants justice more than they want to be understood.