The Forged Impression

Thistle & Oak Mysteries, Book 1

Dr Amanda Blackwell came to Thistle Bay to disappear.

Widowed and finished with people, she restores antiques in a lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the Maine coast — because objects, unlike the living, tell you exactly what they need.

Then a collector is beaten to death with a bronze bookend Amanda sold him. When the detective hands her the murder weapon, the room drops away and she’s inside someone else’s rage: a gold ring with a red stone, expensive cologne, and a terror so complete it had nowhere left to go but violence.

Amanda doesn’t believe in visions. She believes in provenance, in evidence, in what can be proved. So she treats a murder like a forgery — and starts stripping away the layers, one careful question at a time, with the help of a growing circle of unlikely friends, one infuriatingly charming rival antiques dealer, and a very opinionated cat.

But Thistle Bay runs on beautiful things and the lies told about them. And someone she’s passed on the harbor is willing to kill to keep a much larger lie from unraveling.

A restorer whose hands read the truth of a violent thing. A murder disguised as a break-in. A seaside town where nothing is quite the provenance it claims to be.

The Forged Impression is the first Thistle & Oak Mystery—a clean, atmospheric paranormal cozy for readers who like their whodunits sharp, their small towns full of secrets, and their sleuths a little too good at telling the real thing from a fake.