A beloved teacher is dead. The town calls it a fall. The baker knows better.
When seventy-six-year-old retired schoolteacher Gerry Beaufort is found on her own kitchen hearth, Crescent Harbor mourns a sweet old woman who simply slipped. But Sage Holloway-Yates — baker, former food scientist, and reluctant reader of everything a kitchen quietly records — sees what no one else does: a pair of glasses folded the wrong way, and the ghost of a teacup on a counter where Gerry never once stood to drink her tea.
Someone was in that kitchen. Someone calm enough to put the kettle on.
And someone who didn't come for Gerry's silver or her scrimshaw — but for a single water-stained page hidden in an old sea trunk: a list of names from a ship lost off this coast in 1854, kept by one family for six generations so the drowned men would not be forgotten. Now the list is gone, the wrong man is about to take the blame, and the only person asking the right questions is a baker with a black cat, a found-family murder club, and a gift for proving impossible things with evaporation and a steady hand.
But the deeper Sage digs, the clearer it becomes that Gerry's death is only the surface — the first ripple of something the town drowned a very long time ago, and that someone is still keeping, carefully and quietly and at any cost.
The Sailor's Manifest is Book One of the Moonlight Harbor Mysteries — a complete cozy whodunit and the opening piece of a five-book mystery. Coastal Maine warmth, a clever cat, a clean read, and a heart that lingers after the last page.
Perfect for readers who love amateur-sleuth cozies, small-town charm, found family, a cat with opinions, and a mystery with something true at the bottom of it.
One page can keep a name alive — or get someone killed.
Start the series today.
