Some secrets get sewn in instead of spoken.

Nora Kestrel is finally settling into life back on Anchor Island — running her late grandmother's estate-appraisal business, and this year, helping her sister Deb organize the town's beloved Harvest Swap Meet. Her first job is simple enough: put an honest price on the donation boxes piling up at the Grange hall, including a set of hand-stitched quilts from retired boatwright Franklin Colville, made by his mother the winter after his younger brother drowned in 1978.

Franklin only wants one thing before he lets the quilts go — Nora's honest opinion on whether the memorial piece belongs in the sale at all. She never gets to give him an answer. The next morning, Franklin is found dead at the bottom of the Grange hall's back stairs, in what looks like a simple, tragic fall.

But Franklin never worked those stairs alone at night, and Nora can't shake the feeling that a man who'd carried a forty-six-year-old doubt about his brother's "accidental" drowning doesn't just happen to fall down a staircase the week he starts asking uncomfortable questions. When she finds a hidden pocket stitched into his mother's quilt — and the note folded inside it — Nora realizes the swap meet donation everyone assumed was just old cloth may be the only surviving witness to what really happened on the tide flats in 1978.

Warm, wry, and built on a fair-play mystery you can solve alongside her, A Quilt with a Secret Seam deepens Nora's bond with her sister, her slow-burn romance with boatyard owner Callum Halvorsen, and the island's own buried history — one careful stitch at a time.

Perfect for fans of small-town amateur sleuths, cold-case-adjacent cozy mysteries, and stories where the past never stays quite as buried as everyone hoped.