When a water-logged ledger washes up in her bindery, paper conservator Clara Vance can't resist a mystery ? even the kind that gets someone killed.
Clara has a gift she keeps hidden under a pair of cashmere gloves: touch old paper, and it gives up everything it's been keeping. Grief. Fear. Somebody's last secret. It's cost her migraines and worse her whole life, so she doesn't go looking for trouble.
Trouble finds her anyway when Oakhaven Bay's most difficult historian turns up dead over a cup of Earl Grey that should never have killed him ? and the town's new police chief, tired-eyed and too observant for comfort, starts asking questions Clara can't answer without lying.
The dead man was chasing something older than the museum he ran: a two-hundred-year-old harbor charter, seven missing ledgers, and a founding family with far more to hide than a disputed will. Between a locked study, a burnt records office, and a sea cave that floods twice a day, Clara is going to have to choose between the gloves that keep her safe and the truth only her bare hands can read.
Perfect for readers who like their small-town murders solved over a good pot of tea ? with just a touch of the uncanny. A Brew for the Bound is Book One in the Whispering Page Mysteries.