The Stolen Leaves

In Halsey Harbor, Maine, a death does not so much travel as settle. When Ambrose Pelletier-Crane dies peacefully at eighty-eight, a longtime trustee of the town's small subscription library, the gentlest sort of work falls to Marisol Brandt-Halberstam: appraise his careful, lifelong collection of books.

It is exactly the kind of autumn task Marisol does best. Then, in a slim portfolio among his things, she finds a handful of engraved plates and a few leaves of old paper, and her trained eye tells her something the portfolio does not. These were not bought from a broken book. They were cut from books that still sit, looking whole, in the rare-book room of the Halsey Harbor Athenaeum.

Someone has been quietly breaking the library's own collection for years, and Ambrose, it seems, had begun to notice before he died.

Marisol is the one person in town who can read what the books themselves are saying. With the head librarian and a careful local detective, she follows a paper trail through shelf-lists, plate marks, and old ledgers toward a truth that is sadder, and far more human, than a crime.

A warm, literary cozy mystery for readers of Louise Penny and Jacqueline Winspear.