Prose and Cons

The Hargrove Journals exhibition opened on a Friday in March. By Sunday afternoon a respected rare-book authenticator was on the floor of the library.

Spring has come to Thornhaven, and with it the long-awaited Hargrove Journals Exhibition - a curated weekend gala at the Thornhaven Library honoring three generations of coastal Maine naturalists. Black tie. Champagne. A press list. The library's centerpiece display: six of Cecily Marsh's twelve hand-painted silk bookmarks, six of which have already passed through Nora Blackwell's hands.

Then Helena Mercer - invited authenticator, Saturday lecturer, the dealer Nora respected - is found dead in the library's special collection room. The library was closed. The locking pin on the rolling ladder had been removed. And the librarian who built the exhibition has an account of Friday afternoon that does not match what her assistant remembers.

Nora Blackwell, host committee chair and reluctant investigator, recognizes the kind of murder this is the moment she sees the housing of the missing pin. What she does not yet recognize is why Iris Calloway - the most careful curator she has ever worked with - would have any reason to want Helena Mercer dead.

The answer is a cipher Cecily Marsh painted into twelve silk bookmarks in 1893. Six of those bookmarks are now in the library's case. Two have just been found in a Portland dealer's private inventory. The remaining four are somewhere on the coast of Maine. And the cipher, Nora is beginning to understand, is the location of something Cecily Marsh's family spent a hundred and thirty years hiding.

Marlowe, naturally, finds the next bookmark. He has been working at this longer than any of them.

Prose and Cons is the third book in the Inkwell & Whiskers series.

A feel-good cozy mystery - clean, character-driven, with a satisfying solve. Slow-burn romance, no graphic content.

Free in Kindle Unlimited.