The Unwritten Name

A missing page. A false last-boat alibi. A Swiss lakeside murder hidden in the paperwork.

When paper conservator Maja Furrer prepares a decades-old guestbook for display in Spiez, Switzerland, she expects brittle paper and a fussy committee—not a dead benefactor in the archive.

The missing leaf is old. Maja's intake photographs prove it was gone before Otto Aebersold was killed. But a fresh scrap marked 17, caught beneath a brass bookend, points to two nearly identical restoration invoices. Then the trust's original payment book disappears—and the treasurer claims he took a boat that had left hours before the reception.

As rumors drag the close-knit lakeside community toward the guestbook's private past, Maja must separate a promise worth protecting from a crime that demands the truth. With Inspector Luca Marti handling the official investigation, Maja follows what the paper can actually prove—without turning a person's private history into a clue.

A fair-play Swiss cozy mystery on Lake Thun, featuring a paper-conservator amateur sleuth and a non-graphic murder. The first mystery in the Lake Thun Archive Mysteries.