The Mapmaker’s Last Train: a Glass Plate Mystery Plate Mysteries Book

A railway alibi. A forbidden photograph. One last impossible train.

In 1929 Hellinge-by-Sea, everyone knows the Saltern Spur is dead. No passengers, no freight, no late-night engine moving through the fog. The railway records say so. The town says so. The coroner’s verdict depends on it.

Then Mina Wray develops a glass plate photograph that shows a locomotive where no locomotive should be.

Disgraced cataloguer Edwin Pryce came to the coast for a quiet valuation. Now he has a dead Admiralty man, a forged diary, a withdrawn timetable, and a railway map that makes a respectable alibi collapse by inches. Mina sees what the town has trained itself not to see. Pryce reads the records everyone trusted too quickly.

Someone used the silent line to move more than coal. Someone killed to keep the route hidden. And if Pryce and Wray cannot prove how the last train ran, a murderer will remain safely inside the official version of events.

The Mapmaker’s Last Train begins the Glass Plate Mysteries: fair-play historical mystery with railway clues, dry wit, old documents, and a detective partnership built on seeing what everyone else missed.