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The Widow’s Inventory

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Six weeks after the Marin ferry went down in the fog, Mara Vale still sets two cups on the kitchen counter every morning. Then a lawyer in a charcoal suit arrives at her door with a check that could save her late husband’s crumbling family home, and a question she cannot answer: will she move into the Cross estate on the Mendocino cliffs and catalogue the private art collection of Adrian Cross, the man whose company owned the ferry. Adrian Cross is the most feared shipping magnate on the California coast. He is also the man Mara blames, though she has no proof, for the accident that killed Daniel. He has his own reasons for wanting her there. A seascape attributed to a nineteenth-century master has become the centerpiece of a deal that could make or break Cross Maritime, and someone has told him the painting is a forgery. Adrian needs an expert nobody can buy. Mara needs money, and she needs to be close enough to the Cross family to learn what really happened on that water. Winter comes early to Halcyon Point. The house is full of locked rooms, watching staff, and a fiancée who wants Mara gone. Someone is searching Mara’s room at night. Every answer Mara finds opens another lie, and the one man who could explain them is the man she most wants to hate, the man whose hands she keeps noticing, the man who looks at the painting the way she looks at Daniel’s photographs.

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