A Guest List at Lantern Lodge
(2026)(The third book in the Alderwick Second Tide Mystery series)
A novel by Claire Bessey
Tess Alden thought she knew what opening-week pressure looked like. Then death walked into breakfast.
As the owner of Second Tide, her antique shop in the seaside village of Alderwick, Tess has learned that old objects rarely stay quiet for long. But this time the trouble starts at Lantern Lodge, her friend Bea’s newly opened inn, where Tess has helped shape the rooms with her sharp eye for placement, tone, and history. The painted screens in the breakfast room are meant to create warmth and privacy. Instead, they become part of a murder scene.
A quiet guest arrives under a false name, asks the wrong questions about older room pieces, and takes too much interest in the screens Bea bought for the inn. Before opening week can settle into success, he is found dead in the breakfast room, and the fragile future of Lantern Lodge is suddenly at risk. With the inn’s reputation on the line and the village already watching, Tess starts following the one trail no one else seems ready to trust: the objects.
What begins with one suspicious guest and one beautiful room soon widens into something far more dangerous. A travel case full of copied notes. Old inventories no archive kept properly. Estate restructures that made certain domestic objects disappear from official history. The same polished language Tess has seen before, now turning up across more than one Alderwick house. The dead man was not chasing one antique. He was tracing a pattern.
With Tide at her side, Rhys Penwarden grounding the practical reality of routes and access, and Alderwick’s old houses starting to connect in increasingly troubling ways, Tess must uncover who wanted the guest silenced, what the painted screens are hiding, and why one man’s private research was enough to get him killed before breakfast.
Perfect for readers who love British cozy mysteries, seaside village mysteries, antique and inn mysteries, dog cozy mysteries, small town murder mysteries, female sleuth cozy crime, and slow-burn romantic tension with fair-play clues, Book 3 deepens the series with old houses, hidden records, dangerous paper trails, and a village where history is edited long before it is forgotten.
Genre: Mystery
As the owner of Second Tide, her antique shop in the seaside village of Alderwick, Tess has learned that old objects rarely stay quiet for long. But this time the trouble starts at Lantern Lodge, her friend Bea’s newly opened inn, where Tess has helped shape the rooms with her sharp eye for placement, tone, and history. The painted screens in the breakfast room are meant to create warmth and privacy. Instead, they become part of a murder scene.
A quiet guest arrives under a false name, asks the wrong questions about older room pieces, and takes too much interest in the screens Bea bought for the inn. Before opening week can settle into success, he is found dead in the breakfast room, and the fragile future of Lantern Lodge is suddenly at risk. With the inn’s reputation on the line and the village already watching, Tess starts following the one trail no one else seems ready to trust: the objects.
What begins with one suspicious guest and one beautiful room soon widens into something far more dangerous. A travel case full of copied notes. Old inventories no archive kept properly. Estate restructures that made certain domestic objects disappear from official history. The same polished language Tess has seen before, now turning up across more than one Alderwick house. The dead man was not chasing one antique. He was tracing a pattern.
With Tide at her side, Rhys Penwarden grounding the practical reality of routes and access, and Alderwick’s old houses starting to connect in increasingly troubling ways, Tess must uncover who wanted the guest silenced, what the painted screens are hiding, and why one man’s private research was enough to get him killed before breakfast.
Perfect for readers who love British cozy mysteries, seaside village mysteries, antique and inn mysteries, dog cozy mysteries, small town murder mysteries, female sleuth cozy crime, and slow-burn romantic tension with fair-play clues, Book 3 deepens the series with old houses, hidden records, dangerous paper trails, and a village where history is edited long before it is forgotten.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Claire Bessey's A Guest List at Lantern Lodge