The Locket's Truth: A Ravenswood Hollow Mystery - Book 4

Some truths are heavier than a locket has any right to hold.

When a tarnished locket turns up among Ravenswood Hollow's growing collection of stray objects - its clasp jammed, a faded photograph tucked inside that no one in town can name - Tansy expects another quiet, contained mystery. What she finds instead reaches back to St. Mary's Mercy Home, and to a chapter of the district's history most people would rather leave closed: young, unmarried mothers sent away to have their babies in secret, and children who vanished into new families without a single record of where they came from.

The only trace left behind is a set of recipe cards, kept for decades by a woman named Comfort Adeyemi - ordinary-looking, until Tansy realizes the measurements and instructions are hiding something far more precise: names, dates, the quiet arithmetic of children given away and never accounted for. As the cards are decoded one by one, the trail leads somewhere no one expected - including straight to the Hollow's own trusted doctor, a man who has spent a lifetime being the person this town turns to in its most private moments.

For Martha Okafor, the investigation stops being a puzzle and becomes personal, unearthing a connection to her own family she never knew to look for. And when a stranger named Sarah Boyd arrives in Ravenswood Hollow carrying a question of her own, the past and present finally meet face to face.

Through it all, Tansy leans more than ever on Callum - and on a partnership that's quietly become as steady as anything else in her life, even as the ground beneath the town's most respected reputation starts to give way. And curled through it all, missing nothing, is Marmalade - the studio's most opinionated cat, unbothered by locked drawers or buried secrets, but always somehow underfoot exactly when it matters most.

The Locket's Truth is the fourth installment in the Ravenswood Hollow Mystery series, continuing Sage Fernly's tradition of gentle mystery built on real, often-buried Australian history - and closing with a discovery that promises the Hollow's unfinished business is far from over.