When a Western Caribbean cruise ends with a side trip to Panama City, Claire Harmon expects colonial streets, canal locks, and a week away with the man she loves. What she finds instead is a body in Room 310 of the Hotel Central — a fellow traveler, dead in his chair before dawn, with his jacket on and a glass that tells its own quiet story.

The police seal the hotel. Seven guests wait. And somewhere inside the building, behind a false panel in a room that once belonged to a woman named Bobbie, a sixty-year-old secret is still deciding whether it wants to be found.

What Panama Held is a closed-circle mystery set in the heart of Casco Viejo — the UNESCO-listed old city where five centuries of history press up against the present and where silence, it turns out, is its own kind of inheritance. Claire must untangle a bloodline hidden across three generations, a genuinely warm killer, and a journal that was never meant to be read by anyone still alive to act on what it says.

Perfect for readers of Alexander McCall Smith, Richard Osman, and Agatha Christie.