The Last Name in the Book

Twenty years ago, a girl walked into a storm and never came back. Tonight, she just signed the guest register.

On a dying seaside front where the VACANCY sign buzzes like a wasp trapped in glass, former Detective Inspector Daniel Fenn keeps a failing guesthouse and a careful drinking habit, measuring both by the width of two fingers against the fading light. He came to Saltgrave to forget. One case broke him: the disappearance of seventeen-year-old Nell Garrick, a gentle, innocent soul the whole town believed walked into the sea. Fenn has spent two decades pouring whisky over that memory, tending an empty dining room and a bedroom he keeps exactly as his late wife left it — a light in the window for a ship already gone down.

Then, at the back end of September, the booking screen chimes. One night. Cash on arrival. A self-possessed young woman checks into the off-season Cormorant, too young by half to be anyone he can account for, and signs the register in fresh ink: Nell Garrick.

It is no accident.

As autumn gales gnaw the cliffs and the grand, condemned house at Carrow End slides toward the waves, Fenn is dragged back into the one mystery he could never close. But this town would rather let the tide keep its dead, and the trail he should have read twenty years ago winds through planted lies and buried kindnesses toward a truth he cannot bear to follow — a truth that will clear one ghost only by damning the single person who kept him alive.

Marian Holt writes with the salt-worn precision of the best British crime — spare, atmospheric, aching with the particular cold that comes up out of the lino and has nothing to do with the radiators. This is a mystery about grief, guilt, and the terrible cost of finally getting an answer.

Some solutions cost a detective everything.

Start the Saltgrave Mystery series today.