Some secrets keep for a hundred and seventy years. Some are worth killing to keep one winter longer.
It's the dead of a Maine January in Crescent Harbor — gingerbread weather, a frozen harbor, and a June wedding to plan — when eighty-four-year-old Pearl Whitmore dies peacefully in her sleep. A mercy, the whole town agrees. The poor old soul had been failing for months.
But in the weeks before she died, Pearl had begun saying strange things. That her family did a wicked thing, long ago. That there were letters that proved it. That somebody had to put it right before she was gone.
Now she's gone — and the letters are still out there.
Sage Holloway-Yates didn't go looking for this. She's a baker first, happier proving dough than proving a murder. But a gracious death that's a shade too tidy, a cat who won't go near one particular mourner, and a single thread of old cushion-cord left in a saucer pull Sage and researcher Trish Gallagher toward a truth that a beloved, powerful family has spent generations burying: the wives and children left destitute when a ship went down in 1854 and the wages were never paid. Forty-eight souls — and half of them were never even named.
To bring the widows' letters into the light, Sage will have to keep two things at once: the names of the wronged dead, and her own face — in a town that adores the very person she has most reason to fear.
The Widows' Letters is the fourth Moonlight Harbor mystery: a slow-burn, deep-winter cozy about grief, stubbornness, and the long patient work of refusing to let people go down nameless.
This book features:
•A food-scientist baker who reads clues the way she reads a loaf
•A warm, lived-in coastal Maine town and the people who keep it
•A clever cat with very firm opinions
•All the violence safely off the page, and a gingerbread recipe at the back
Best enjoyed in order — start with The Sailor's Manifest. Four pieces are home now. One winter remains.
