The Missing Dedication

A dedication can be cut from a book. The person it names is harder to erase.

Bramblewick's first Book & Paper Festival should be Charlie Vale's happiest weekend since inheriting The Lantern & Quill. Instead, visiting rare-bookseller Miles Corbin arrives carrying a privately printed novel with a single page torn from nearly every surviving copy.

The book is The Glass Orchard, a thinly veiled account of a young woman's unexplained death in 1979. Its dedication names no one-only "the one who stayed after the glass broke." Miles believes that person was Aunt Wren. Before he can explain how he knows, he is found dead beside the festival's antique hand press, the dedication leaf torn from his copy and the printer's record gone.

Following the surviving copies through private libraries and a ruined glasshouse, Charlie watches the story inside the novel come apart. The girl who died was a writer whose words were taken from her, and Bramblewick's most respected families each guarded a different piece of that night. Worse, the wise aunt Charlie has always imagined was not merely a witness-she was there. To name a killer, Charlie must learn what it means to tell a true story without owning the person at its heart.

The Lantern & Quill Mysteries, Book Seven. A cozy about authorship, grief, and the difference between honoring a life and claiming it. Reads perfectly alone.

Perfect for fans of Kate Carlisle's Bibliophile Mysteries, Jenn McKinlay's Library Lover's Mysteries, and Ellery Adams's Book Retreat Mysteries.

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