The Lighthouse Keeper's Secret: A Harbor Light Inn Cozy Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798183712650)

Gull Harbor's last lighthouse keeper fell down his own tower stairs. There's just one problem: his knees were so bad he hadn't climbed them in years.

It's autumn in Gull Harbor, Maine, the summer people are gone, and the town is quietly mourning Cal Tibbetts - the beloved old keeper who tended the harbor light for sixty years and was found at the foot of its stairs. A sad accident, everyone agrees. Time to sell the lighthouse and move on.

But Nora Marsh - city chef turned innkeeper - noticed something at the cottage that the town wants to overlook: a full thermos of tea, gone cold by the door, made for a dawn walk Cal never took. Cal didn't die climbing his tower. He died in his kitchen, and someone went to a great deal of careful trouble to make it look otherwise.

To learn why, Nora has to reopen the one story Gull Harbor has refused to speak of for fifty-five years: a shipwreck on a foggy night, a light that should have been burning and wasn't, and a founding fortune built on the bodies the sea gave back. The keeper kept a secret all that time. Someone has just killed to keep it buried - and it isn't the stranger in town or the developer everyone loves to suspect. It's the last person in three harbors anyone would dare accuse.

With the detective she's falling for caught between a job offer and a reason to stay, Nora will have to read a dead man's kitchen like a recipe, follow a clue only a cook would catch, and let an old light finally say the name it has kept in the dark for half a century - before the most respected hands in town close around one more secret.

Set in a salt-and-fog Maine harbor town you'll want to move to, The Lighthouse Keeper's Secret is the third Harbor Light Inn Mystery: a fair-play whodunit with a slow-burn romance, a town you'll wish were yours, one opinionated orange cat, and - of course - two recipes from the inn's kitchen.

Put the kettle on, mind the tide, and come in out of the fog.