Hexes & Hardcovers: A Cornish Bookshop Cozy Mystery (The Blackwater Quay Mysteries Book 1)

When Elowen Finch inherits her great-aunt's magical bookshop on the Cornish coast, she gains more than inventory and a shop cat. She discovers an ability to read the emotional residue left behind in old documents. When a mysterious annotated property record arrives in an estate donation, Elowen sells it to a nervous historian named Percival Alder. Two days later, he is found dead at the foot of the harbour wall, and the book has vanished. The records inside could expose that Blackwater Quay's most powerful family built their fortune on two centuries of fraud—directly in the path of a fifty-million-pound development project. With help from Atlas, her magically perceptive cat, Benji the café owner, and Mrs. Tilling, a retired headmistress and town historian, Elowen must use her gift to uncover what the old documents reveal before she becomes a target herself. This is the first book in the Blackwater Quay cozy mystery series, set in a Cornish harbour town where centuries-old secrets linger in the margins of old books.