The Sea Captain's Portrait - The Marjorie Corey Files, #3

An old painting in a coffee shop hallway. A four-hundred-thousand-dollar authentication. A lawyer dead on the ferry. And a land deed that reaches all the way back to the Civil War. The third short mystery in The Marjorie Corey Files.

For years no one looked closely at the portrait in the Ginger Mae's back hallway, the weathered sea captain everyone assumed was Grandma Knapp's grandfather. Then a retired art authenticator finally asks to examine it, and his verdict changes everything: an 1847 oil of real museum value, and a piece of history the island never knew it owned.

The authentication draws an estate lawyer from the mainland with a claim that the painting belongs to a prominent old family. She arrives with very good paperwork. Three days later she calls Victoria from the ferry landing to say she has found something in the county records, something she will explain when she reaches the island. She never reaches the island. By the time the ferry docks, she has been dead for twenty minutes.

This is Olivia's case to crack, tracing deeds, ledgers, and altered county records back through a hundred and fifty years to the free Black merchant captain who actually painted himself into the island's history, the grandmother who was given a future, and the careful forgery that tried to erase both. Some things, it turns out, wait for the right people to find them.

THE SEA CAPTAIN'S PORTRAIT is Book Three of The Marjorie Corey Files, a complete series of warmly atmospheric island mysteries. Each book stands alone and opens one more drawer in the life of the woman who left the shop behind. For readers of Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves, and Jacqueline Winspear.

A mystery about provenance, memory, and what a place truly owns.