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...

Eli Rowan comes to Willowmere looking for a place to stop.He finds one. The town beside the lake has the quality of somewhere that has been tended for a long time — neighbours who nod, a café that opens at the same hour every morning, a lake at the end of the main road that catches the light differently in October than it does in summer. The newspaper shop comes with a ledger, a lease, and work that keeps the hands occupied without demanding too much from the mind. Eli does not ask...