Specters and Silverware

Everyone in Port Providence knew that handrail was loose. It was tight when the police got there.

The Autumn Festival was supposed to be eight days of cider and brass bands. Instead a visiting silver dealer lies at the foot of a two-hundred-year-old staircase, a spent lantern in one hand and a Paul Revere tankard in the other.

Chief Hank Caldwell has a fall, a storm, and no evidence of anything else.

Penny Goodwyn has a contradiction and nowhere to put it.

Then the nor'easter takes the roads out. Thirty-six hours, no power, nobody in or out - and somewhere in the dark, a piece of the Revere silver walks out of its case.

When Penny lays a bare hand on the tankard, the silver gives her what it has. Not the fall. Not a name. Thirty years of somebody wanting it, gone quiet.

She thinks she knows whose wanting that is.

She is about to be wrong about it, out loud, in front of the chief.

Every clue is on the page. Five of them - plus a basset hound who has been pointing at that staircase since the morning the silver went in, and a killer who stopped on the way out to tidy up.

Specters and Silverware is the second Port Providence Antique Mystery: a fair-play, closed-circle whodunit in a foggy coastal village, with a slow-burn romance, a gentle touch of the paranormal, no gore, and a dog who saves the day.