A Mediterranean cruise. A reliquary missing for a thousand years. A retired history teacher who reads the footnotes everyone else skipped.
When a young influencer is found dead aboard the MV Calliope, retired history teacher Martha Bancroft is drawn into a mystery stretching back a thousand years — to a lost Byzantine reliquary and the network willing to kill for it.
A second envelope arrives from Athens. It quotes a woman in an Attica cell: an English country house, a 1994 monograph, three hands in the margins. Martha Bancroft has read the monograph. Until now, not the margins.
A third envelope arrives in Marblehead — forwarded, with apologies, by a Genevan foundation that does not, as a matter of policy, forward anything. Inside: a sheet of headed stationery, a citation in a hand Martha has not seen for a quarter of a century, and a footnote referring to an object the foundation does not, officially, own.
A letter Martha sent to a dive supervisor on the Cretan coast comes back unopened — and the man it was addressed to is found dead in his workshop. The gear in his shed has been moved. The pathologist's report notes no irregularities. Martha notes several.
A neighbour's folder appears on Martha's kitchen table in June and is still there in September — manila, plain, marked BEACON HILL, BOSTON LLC — 14 FRANKLIN COURT in Annie Lippincott's careful capitals. By the second week of September, the folder has begun to thicken in a particular way.
The Footnote Mysteries — five books in print, a sixth in progress.
Most people, when they read a book, treat the footnotes the way they treat the chairs in a hotel lobby — they assume someone responsible put them there, they decline to sit in them, and they continue on to the bar.
Continue reading → April 2026The town in which Martha Bancroft lives is a real one. The cottage on Front Street is invented. The cat, regrettably, is real.
Continue reading → March 2026Provenance is a discreet word for a noisy thing. It says: this object was somewhere once, and is somewhere else now, and the reason for the difference is a story we have agreed not to tell loudly.
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