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?
