Pouring the Widow's Gin

Cleo Vasquez runs the Foghorn, a Seattle waterfront speakeasy with bad lighting, good gin, and one permanent customer who never orders. Her late husband Marco haunts the back booth and second-guesses her martini technique. She has made peace with most of it. Then Ilsa, the bar's oldest regular and the last water witch of the Sound, is found dead in the alley. The police look at Cleo. Marco looks at the empty stool where Ilsa's tide book used to sit. That little leather journal predicted drownings in Puget Sound, and someone has been selling its forecasts to a shipping company that moves things it should not. Cleo has a bar, a ghost, a barback, and one bottle that Marco has never managed to touch. Tonight he is going to try. Some husbands are better dead. Some are just harder to reach.