A Camera for a Killer — Sparrow Harbor Mysteries

Some pictures wait fifty years to be seen. Some people spend fifty years making sure they never are. Augustus Thorne's bluff-top cottage has sat untouched since his death fifteen years ago, its extraordinary camera collection finally ready for appraisal — sixty cameras, each one meticulously documented, save for a single folding camera marked in his own hand: Loaded, undeveloped. Do not open. Nora Kestrel has it developed carefully, properly, under archival conditions. But before the film ever comes out of the darkroom, a mainland collector who couldn't resist the temptation to see it first is found dead among the developing trays — an accident with old chemicals, according to the coroner. Nora's dog disagrees, and he's been right every time before. As the photograph finally comes into focus, faint and water-spotted but unmistakable, it reveals a fragment of the same story Nora has been slowly piecing together all year: a night in 1911, a warehouse fire, and someone carrying away exactly the records that were never supposed to survive. Someone on Anchor Island has been guarding that secret for half a century — and they're not ready to let it develop now. Perfect for fans of small-town amateur sleuths, decades-old secrets finally coming to light, and cozy mysteries where the past refuses to stay in the dark.