The Reservation Room 14

THE RESERVATION ROOM 14
A Razor Beach Mystery · Book 1

On a wet February afternoon, a man with a calm voice calls the Cliffside Inn from a number nobody can trace. He books Room 14 for a date six months out. He pays cash, mailed in an unmarked envelope. The name on the booking is a name no driver's license has ever held.

A year later, on a Tuesday night in the quiet off-season, the housekeeper opens the door and screams.

Detective Margaret Voss has been in Longfellow Point for two months. She wasn't supposed to be here. She was supposed to be a city detective with an old job, an old apartment, and a certainty about how her career would go. Instead, she's standing over a man on a bed in a small coastal town, looking at a body with no fingerprints in any database, no face in any record, no pockets at all, except for a single playing card. The four of spades.

The dead man is going to turn out to be many things. A father in Oregon whose children have already buried him once. A husband whose wife has been wearing the wrong widow for four months. A contractor with stage-four cancer and a life-insurance policy that pays only for wrongful death.

He didn't come to the Inn to die. He came to be murdered.

And on the small careful evidence Margaret finds, a wind chime made of forks, a photograph inscribed FOR AFTER, a locker with a brass padlock, the dead man wasn't guessing. He picked the room. He picked the killer. He picked the detective, a year ago, from a paragraph in the city paper.

Now Margaret has nine days, a partner who knows the bakery's back-door hours, a seventy-eight-year-old innkeeper with a list of names, and a case whose answer the law doesn't quite know what to do with.

The case file is the case file.
The truth is something else.