The Portrait's Secret
(2026)(The second book in the Thistle & Oak Mysteries series)
A novel by Clara Ashby
Dr Amanda Blackwell knows that every damaged object has a story. Some are determined to tell it.
In the coastal town of Thistle Bay, Maine, Amanda restores antiques in a lighthouse keeper's cottage—because objects, unlike people, are usually honest about where they've been hurt.
The portrait on her easel should be an ordinary commission: cracked varnish, unstable paint, a century of poor decisions. Then Amanda touches the damaged canvas, and the room drops away. A man is dead. Someone has taken great care to make his death look peaceful.
Amanda doesn't trust visions. She trusts provenance, physical evidence, and whatever remains after a lie has been stripped away.
Then a celebrated painter arrives for Thistle Bay's summer arts festival—and is murdered before the judging begins.
The victim left behind admirers, enemies, and several people who are suddenly careful about what they remember. Amanda has a damaged portrait, fragments of a death no living person witnessed, and the unsettling conviction that the town has preserved the wrong version of its own history.
To find the killer, she must uncover what happened more than a century ago—before someone makes certain the truth stays buried.
In Thistle Bay, the past doesn't stay buried. It waits for someone with the wrong gift to come along and dig it up.
A restorer whose hands read the truth of a violent thing. A murder hidden beneath the brightness of a summer arts festival. A seaside town where some secrets have been preserved far too carefully.
The Portrait's Secret is the second Thistle & Oak Mystery—a clean, atmospheric paranormal cozy for readers who like their whodunits sharp, their small towns full of secrets, and their sleuths a little too good at telling restoration from disguise.
Genre: Mystery
In the coastal town of Thistle Bay, Maine, Amanda restores antiques in a lighthouse keeper's cottage—because objects, unlike people, are usually honest about where they've been hurt.
The portrait on her easel should be an ordinary commission: cracked varnish, unstable paint, a century of poor decisions. Then Amanda touches the damaged canvas, and the room drops away. A man is dead. Someone has taken great care to make his death look peaceful.
Amanda doesn't trust visions. She trusts provenance, physical evidence, and whatever remains after a lie has been stripped away.
Then a celebrated painter arrives for Thistle Bay's summer arts festival—and is murdered before the judging begins.
The victim left behind admirers, enemies, and several people who are suddenly careful about what they remember. Amanda has a damaged portrait, fragments of a death no living person witnessed, and the unsettling conviction that the town has preserved the wrong version of its own history.
To find the killer, she must uncover what happened more than a century ago—before someone makes certain the truth stays buried.
In Thistle Bay, the past doesn't stay buried. It waits for someone with the wrong gift to come along and dig it up.
A restorer whose hands read the truth of a violent thing. A murder hidden beneath the brightness of a summer arts festival. A seaside town where some secrets have been preserved far too carefully.
The Portrait's Secret is the second Thistle & Oak Mystery—a clean, atmospheric paranormal cozy for readers who like their whodunits sharp, their small towns full of secrets, and their sleuths a little too good at telling restoration from disguise.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Clara Ashby's The Portrait's Secret