A series about Martha Bancroft, a retired Marblehead history teacher who reads the footnotes everyone else skips — and the international antiquities crimes that hide there.
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.