THE EMPTY CHAIR

A quiet death. A final letter. A love story sixty years unfinished. When Colin Ferris, one of Beacon Point's founding residents, dies peacefully after years of tending his beloved roses, the village is left with an absence no one quite knows how to fill. There is no suspicious death, no obvious crime, and no villain waiting in the shadows — only an empty chair at Thursday dinner, a fading garden, and one final request left behind for Arthur. Inside an old gardening guide, Colin has hidden a letter asking the Last Committee to discover what became of Eleanor Whitfield, the woman he loved and lost six decades earlier. Not to change the past. Not to reopen old wounds. Simply so that someone, somewhere, might remember she mattered. As Arthur, Margaret, Dorothy, Helen, Michael, Valerie, and Warwick follow the fragile trail of records, memories, and unsent words, they uncover a story shaped by tenderness, silence, regret, and unexpected grace. What begins as the gentlest case the committee has ever taken becomes one of its most moving — a reminder that some mysteries do not need a crime to break your heart. The Empty Chair is a warm, reflective cosy mystery about friendship, late-life courage, grief, and the quiet work of remembering the people who must not be allowed to disappear.