A spring wedding. A locked island. A body in the chapel.
When a wedding party arrives at Mara Vale's guest house on Harrow Isle, everything is in order. The rooms are ready. The chapel is prepared. The storm is still four days offshore - or so the forecast says.
By Saturday morning, the ferry is cancelled, the island is cut off, and Eleanor Reardon - the groom's mother - is dead at the base of the chapel gallery stairs. The official explanation is a fall. Mara knows better. The angle is wrong. The portfolio Eleanor carried everywhere has a page missing. And the man who killed her is still in the house.
With thirty-six hours before the mainland can reach the island, Mara has a storm-locked guest house full of suspects, a harbor manager she trusts more than she's admitted, and a retired forensic pathologist who came for a wedding and stayed to tell the truth about what she saw.
But Eleanor didn't come to Harrow Isle only for her son's wedding. She came because she'd found something - documents buried in her late father-in-law's private files that connect the Reardon family to a fraud older than anyone in the room understands. A fraud that reaches back to 1882. To a woman whose name was erased from the county registry, whose marriage was falsified, whose family's claim to this island was suppressed rather than resolved.
That woman's heir is also in the house.
The Locked Season is the second book in The Last Guest House Trilogy - a complete, stand-alone murder mystery that deepens the series arc begun in The Last Guest House. Fair-play clues, a closed-circle storm investigation, old-money rot, and a slow-burn romantic thread that refuses to resolve quietly.
For readers of Ruth Ware, Lucy Foley, and Janice Hallett.
Some secrets the tide keeps. Some truths the storm returns.
