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The Reservation Room 14
Paperback
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Publisher: Ellis Glass
Pages: 314
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.66 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
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 quiet Tuesday night in the 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 a city detective with an old apartment and a certainty about how her career would go, until a case she was right about got her demoted, and the coast was quietly offered as somewhere to disappear to. Instead she's standing over a dead man in a small coastal town 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 two children have already buried him once, in October, in a closed casket the family was told not to open. A husband whose wife has been a widow for four months. A contractor with stage-four pancreatic cancer and a life-insurance policy that pays $750,000 for natural death, and doubles to $1.5 million if the death is ruled a homicide.
He didn't come to the Cliffside Inn to die. He came to be murdered. He booked the room a year ago. He mailed the cash. He hired the killer. He wrote the confession script for the woman he'd loved for forty years, in case she needed one. He arranged for the wind chime on his family's porch, a small chime made of forks that would, on the small careful chance a coastal detective ever traced it, tell her his name.
And a year ago, in a small carpeted conference room in San Francisco, he picked Detective Margaret Voss from a paragraph in the city paper about her demotion, because he'd read that paragraph and judged that she was good enough to solve his case, and human enough to consider not exposing it.
Margaret has nine days. She has a deputy who knows the bakery's back-door hours, a seventy-eight-year-old innkeeper with a forty-year secret, a widow at a butcher block in Oregon, and a thirteen-year-old girl with a small spiral notebook and a drawing of a wind chime. She has a case where the truth of what happened would punish the family the dead man was trying to protect. And she has a case-closure form on her sheriff's desk with a black pen laid across it, waiting.
The case file is the case file. The truth is something else.
The Reservation Room 14 is a beach-read mystery with the moral weight of literary fiction, a story about a man who measured twice before every decision he made in his life, a woman who has to decide what to do about it, and a small coastal town that has been quietly keeping its own kinds of arrangements for a long time.
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