The Last Letter

Three weeks after his father's funeral, forensic accountant Daniel Mercer finds a nameless envelope tucked into the desk of the family's antiquarian bookshop in the coastal village of Blackwood Cove. Inside is a single line in blue ballpoint: Accession 94–C. Look where the binding split.

Hidden in the spine of a hollowed-out sea-chart book, Daniel finds a letter written by a woman two days before she supposedly drowned, a suspicious shipping ledger, and a faded Polaroid of his father standing beside a stranger with Daniel's own amber eyes. For thirty-two years he has believed the sea took his mother. Now he is no longer sure the sea was ever to blame.

His search leads from the shelves of his father's shop, to the bindery across the alley, to an abandoned lighthouse on a storm-lashed headland. There a sea chest and a stack of oilcloth notebooks wait to tell him what his father spent twenty-seven years burying.

The Last Letter is a novel of mystery and family secrets about love that looks like fear, loyalty that cannot be told apart from cowardice, and a truth that was buried for a lifetime, until someone decided it should be found.