A Compass for the DeadBook 2 in the Thorne & Linus: Cartographic Mysteries SeriesA dead lighthouse keeper. A village with too much French wine. And a harbor where the charts lie.

Surveyor Silas Thorne has followed his missing father's trail from the gold camps of the High Sierras to a fog-bound fishing village on the Mendocino coast. His commission is to map a new coastal road. His real purpose is to understand why a brass marker stamped with his father's initials bears a bearing that points to Sentinel Point — a place where the lighthouse burns true and the ships still die.

When a supply vessel wrecks on the rocks and the lighthouse keeper is found hanging from the gallery, Silas and his partner Linus are drawn into a mystery measured in yards and minutes. The harbor buoys have been shifted exactly forty yards. The posted tide tables are wrong by exactly twenty minutes. The precision is not accident. It is architecture.

Behind the fog and the silence, Silas uncovers a village-wide conspiracy — nine years of organized wrecking, a salvage economy built on stolen cargo, and a community that chose survival over conscience. But as the evidence mounts and an incoming passenger ship steams toward the trap, Silas must do more than solve the crime. He must correct the harbor before sixty passengers sail into a graveyard.

And in a warehouse behind the general store, a crate waits. Addressed to E. Thorne. Shipped from London. On a ship that was wrecked in a harbor his father surveyed twenty years before he disappeared.

For fans of Arturo Perez-Reverte, Caleb Carr, and Patrick O'Brian. Combining the investigative precision of a surveyor's field journal with the atmospheric tension of the fog-bound Pacific coast, A Compass for the Dead is historical mystery where the map is the murder weapon and the truth is measured to the minute.