Reading the Capo

Maisie Okonkwo reads people for a living — quietly, for money, out of the back room of the Pine Hollow library. When Silvio Barone walks in with a briefcase and a business proposal, she does the job and then keeps the copies, because the contracts he's holding are buying her whole town one parcel at a time. Silvio came west to bury a feud and build something legal. He did not come to fall for a librarian. Their deal is simple: she keeps quiet, he funds her library wing. But Maisie's brother is on a list Silvio was sent to act on, and in a town this small nothing stays in the back room for long. She will have to choose — and she will choose first, and she will choose hard.