Some bookshops just sell books. Finch & Fable reads them.
When Elowen Finch inherited her great-aunt’s magical bookshop on the Cornish coast, she got the shop cat, a lifetime supply of ink-stained cardigans, and an ability she’d never quite claimed: the power to read the emotional residue left behind in old documents.
She also got a problem.
A mysterious annotated property record turns up in an estate donation — and two days after Elowen sells it to a nervous historian named Percival Alder, he turns up dead at the foot of the harbour wall. The book is gone. And the records inside it, if genuine, would prove that Blackwater Quay’s most powerful family built their fortune on two centuries of fraud — right where a fifty-million-pound development is about to break ground.
Aided by Atlas, her magically perceptive cat, Benji the café owner who commits to the sidekick role with alarming enthusiasm, and the formidable Mrs. Tilling — retired headmistress, unofficial town historian, devastatingly accurate gossip — Elowen must use her gift to uncover what the ink remembers before someone decides she knows too much.
Hexes & Hardcovers is the first book in the Blackwater Quay cozy mystery series — warm, witty, and steeped in the atmosphere of a Cornish harbour town where the secrets run centuries deep and the margins of old books remember everything.
Perfect for fans of T.E. Kinsey, Paige Shelton, and Juliet Blackwell.
