The Prattler Files

Sixteen issues of the island newspaper are missing from the archive. Not lost. Removed. The fourth short mystery in The Marjorie Corey Files asks what a town deletes from its own record, and why.

When the longtime editor of the Patchogu Prattler dies and leaves the paper's archive to the island historical society, Victoria, Olivia, and Solei volunteer to help with the digitization. The Prattler has recorded every storm, election, and shop opening on the island since 1934, a continuous account of a small place keeping track of itself. Continuous, except for one gap. Four months of 1969 and 1970 have been cut clean from the binding.

What was on those pages: a land dispute that split the island's two churches, a fire that killed a couple at the north end, and a young woman named Ruth Helen Bright who was last seen at the Ginger Mae and then was never seen again. She is alive. She is seventy-seven. And she has been waiting fifty years for someone to ask.

As the women trace the deletion, the editor's nephew arrives to settle the estate and shows an unusual interest in keeping certain files buried. The trail leads to a campaign of quiet land pressure, a family that profited, and the discovery that Grandma Knapp spent three years protecting people from harm done in her own family's name. This is the cost of loving a good man whose relatives were not.

THE PRATTLER FILES is Book Four of The Marjorie Corey Files, a complete series of warmly atmospheric island mysteries. Each book stands alone and opens one more drawer in the life of the woman who left the shop behind. For readers of Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves, and Jacqueline Winspear.

A mystery about the record we keep and the harm we choose to repair.