RESERVED

Nearly a year has passed since Jan Vale returned to Penraven, and life has finally settled back into something resembling normal. The library has found its familiar rhythm, another Christmas has come and gone, Jan has another birthday approaching, and Moss-older, greyer and supposedly wiser-is enjoying retirement, three walks a day and every treat he can persuade someone to give him.Then a young woman at the library makes an unexpected discovery.A chance encounter on social media leads her to a man with the same surname. What begins as curiosity becomes something extraordinary: they share the same father. A father who walked out when she was a baby, briefly returned when she was five, and then disappeared from her life again.Her newly discovered half-brother brings something their father left behind after his death.A key.It bears only a number, but Jan recognises what others don’t. With the help of an old reference book, she identifies it as belonging to a safety-deposit box.What waits inside isn’t money.It’s a lifetime of research.Photographs. Records. Names. Newspaper cuttings. Notes. Evidence carefully gathered and hidden by a man who knew far more about the past than he ever told his daughter.And at the centre of it all is an impossible suggestion:Her mother may not be the woman she has always claimed to be.Decades earlier, a frightened young woman arrived in Cornwall carrying a stolen bag, a new identity and a terrible secret. She had witnessed something that could have got her killed, fled the violent man whose life she had shared, and buried everything she knew beneath the quiet respectability of Penraven.But someone eventually found her.The father of her child.He chose not to expose her. Instead, he spent years following the fragments of a story involving a criminal network, a haulage company, a bloodstained van, a murdered mechanic and a driver who vanished without explanation.He never solved it.He simply reserved the truth for the one person he believed had the right to decide what to do with it.His daughter.Now Jan begins pulling at the thread he left behind.There may be no fresh body, no obvious killer and no conventional murder investigation-but some mysteries are about more than finding out who killed whom. Sometimes the hardest truth to uncover is the one a family has spent a lifetime protecting.With Moss beside her-occasionally helpful, frequently asleep and still perfectly capable of forgetting his age when confronted by a Frisbee or squirrel-Jan must separate memory from evidence, fear from guilt, and love from forgiveness.Because discovering the truth about your family doesn’t necessarily tell you who was good and who was bad.Sometimes it reveals that they were simply human.RESERVED is the fifth Jan Vale Mystery: a warm, character-driven Cornish mystery about family secrets, buried identities, second chances and the truths we keep until someone is finally ready to find them.