Description
Once a year, forty chairs are set at the Crooked Lantern Inn -- and the people who belong simply arrive.
This Halloween, Mara Wick hosts the Forty Supper for the first time. The lantern swings though every window is shut. A sealed note warns her to count the guests before the clock stops... and again after. Then she finds a place card she never wrote: her grandmother's name. Eleanor Wick has been dead for twelve years.
At 7:40 the grandfather clock fails. A living guest vanishes. Knocks answer from inside a wall that shouldn't open -- and Mara discovers the Inn she inherited is bound to an older promise than any deed on file.
Trapped by storm and secret, the regulars must decide what they still owe the Lantern -- and what the Lantern still owes the village.
A cozy prequel mystery of locked rooms, village loyalty, and a truth too important to leave on paper alone.
Once a year, forty chairs are set at the Crooked Lantern Inn -- and the people who belong simply arrive.
This Halloween, Mara Wick hosts the Forty Supper for the first time. The lantern swings though every window is shut. A sealed note warns her to count the guests before the clock stops... and again after. Then she finds a place card she never wrote: her grandmother's name. Eleanor Wick has been dead for twelve years.
At 7:40 the grandfather clock fails. A living guest vanishes. Knocks answer from inside a wall that shouldn't open -- and Mara discovers the Inn she inherited is bound to an older promise than any deed on file.
Trapped by storm and secret, the regulars must decide what they still owe the Lantern -- and what the Lantern still owes the village.
A cozy prequel mystery of locked rooms, village loyalty, and a truth too important to leave on paper alone.