When a missing deed packet exposes an old family secret, private investigator Eve Harlan learns that the strongest alibi in Ashmere Bay may be the one that proves the least.
Eve Harlan has returned to Ashmere Bay to revive The Harlan Agency, a small private investigation office above a bookshop on Harbor Street. The work is usually quiet: missing documents, family disputes, local scandals, and the kind of trouble people prefer not to take to the police first.
Then Eleanor Price arrives with a folded diner napkin, nine names, and a blue folder that should have proved her family's clean ownership of a cottage near the old ferry road.
By the next day, Leo Price is dead near North Pier.
Leo had a ferry ticket. It looked like an alibi. It looked like proof he had gone where he said he had gone. But Eve knows the difference between what evidence proves and what people want it to imply. A ticket can prove a purchase without proving a journey. A photograph can prove a folder was present without proving the right page was inside.
As Eve follows the trail from Connie's Diner to City Hall, from the old ferry road to North Pier, she uncovers a family story built on controlled papers, missing names, and one woman Ashmere Bay was encouraged to forget.
For readers who enjoy atmospheric small-town mysteries, clever alibis, professional female investigators, family secrets, and clean mysteries with cozy crossover appeal, The North Pier Alibi begins The Ashmere Bay Mysteries with a case where every document has a surface, every witness has a limit, and every quiet street remembers more than it says.
