The footnote was three hundred words long. Sixteen people died because of it.
Martha Bancroft is not a detective. She is a seventy-two-year-old retired history professor, recently widowed, mildly skeptical about the whole Mediterranean cruise, and the author of exactly one piece of writing anyone has ever cared deeply about: a small, careful essay published in 2003 on a Byzantine emperor’s lost shipment of gold — imperial treasure that vanished into the Aegean Sea in 1074 and was never recovered.
She assumed no one had read it.
She was wrong about that. She was wrong about the cruise, too.
When Martha boards the Astraea Seas for a ten-day voyage through the Greek islands, she expects nothing more taxing than a good view of Santorini and the chance to finish a book she has been meaning to finish for six years. What she finds instead, in the ship’s private library, is her own essay — annotated, dog-eared, and read with an attention she has not given it herself in two decades.
Someone on this ship has been waiting for Martha Bancroft.
Someone has been waiting for a very long time.
As the voyage carries her through the luminous waters of the Aegean, Martha begins to understand the shape of what she has sailed into: a conspiracy three generations deep, a fortune in ancient Byzantine gold lying somewhere on the seafloor below her, and a trail of sixteen deaths — carefully spaced, meticulously staged as accidents — that all lead back to a single sunken ship, a thousand-year-old storm, and the obscure footnote that a twenty-nine-weeks-pregnant history professor sat up three nights writing, never imagining that anyone would ever have reason to make her regret it.
Martha is a historian. She does not make assumptions without evidence. She does not panic. And she has spent forty years in the company of the long dead, which has given her a particular equanimity about the merely dangerous.
She is going to need all of it.
Because the woman who arranged those sixteen deaths is on this ship. She has pearls at her throat and a warm, pleasant voice and a flawless cover story, and she is standing close enough to touch — and she has just realized that Martha Bancroft is not, after all, the kind of woman who can be quietly managed.
A Byzantine mystery a thousand years in the making. A conspiracy that has survived sixteen deaths. And a retired history teacher from Massachusetts who reads every footnote to the end.
The Empress’s Wake is a gripping historical mystery for fans of Richard Osman, Donna Leon, Jacqueline Winspear, and Alan Bradley — and for anyone who has ever suspected that the most dangerous person in any room is the one nobody thought to watch.
Book One of The Footnote Mysteries.
