The Ledger of Small Mercies

In Marrowgrove, the dead file one apology each. Vesper Quill keeps them. When the town's baker dies of a sweetness he never ate, the apology on his desk is addressed to her. The council gives her a week to sort the ledger before they burn it — and every page she reads rearranges someone she thought she knew. Because someone has been correcting the dead for forty years, and the corrections read like kindness. Vesper's own mother's page is in there. It does not say what she was told. She can expose the hand that did it, or she can file the ledger exactly as found. One of those choices ends the town. A cozy fantasy mystery and an absolutely unputdownable psychological thriller about the mercy of an unedited record.