Both Sides Choose Her: A Midlife Romance and a Charleston Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798181315884)

She can authenticate any document in the Lowcountry. The one truth she never examined was her own.
At fifty-three, Eleanor Voss is the most trusted forensic handwriting examiner in Charleston - the rare expert both sides of a contested will agree to hire, precisely because she has no side of her own. She has spent thirty careful years reading the truth in other people's ink and keeping her own life pressed flat, where it won't show.
Then two cover letters arrive on the same morning, hiring her from opposite ends of the same bitter inheritance fight. With them comes James Calloway: gracious, gray-eyed, widowed, opposing counsel - and the first person in a very long time to look at Eleanor as though she might be a subject worth studying, and not merely the woman holding the magnifier.
The assignment seems simple. Examine a codicil that would leave a grand old house on Tradd Street to the woman who has tended it for decades, and confirm what the family already believes: that it is a forgery.
But the deeper Eleanor reads, the more the document refuses to lie the way she has been paid for it to. Pressed into the page beneath the ink is the ghost of something truer - a dying woman's last, fierce wish, and the long-buried wrong it was meant to set right at last. Telling the literal truth would keep her client happy and her reputation spotless. It would also turn an innocent woman out of the only home she has ever loved.
Now the most impartial woman in Charleston must decide the one thing her whole careful life was built to avoid: when the law and justice disagree, which one will she serve - and what is she willing to lose to do it?
Both Sides Chose Her is a warm, slow-burn later-in-life romance and an evidence-led Lowcountry mystery, unfolding across a present-day investigation and the private diary of the woman at its heart. Perfect for readers who love:

• Later-in-life love stories with mature, fully grown characters in their fifties
• Cozy, non-violent mysteries solved by wit and patience instead of weapons
• A slow-burn, closed-door romance with genuine warmth and tenderness
• Atmospheric Southern settings steeped in Gullah Geechee history
• Family secrets, contested wills, and a quiet, principled fight for what is right

A standalone Southern novel - no cliffhanger, no cruelty, and a love story that earns its ending.
Lift the page, and read the truth pressed beneath it. Begin Both Sides Chose Her today.

Author: Maria Starlight
ISBN-13: 9798181315884
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 07/01/2026
Pages: 198
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.42d