A Note for the Missing
(2026)(The third book in the Telegraph Hill Mystery series)
A novel by Lila Blake
A woman in the water. A story someone has spent fifty-eight years controlling.
When true-crime podcaster Hollis Yardley arrives in North Beach searching for buried scandals, eighty-year-old Esther Vogel knows exactly which story he wants.
In 1968, Esther’s sister Ruth—a promising young poet—drowned at Aquatic Park. Her death was ruled a tragic accident, and a celebrated literary foundation has spent decades preserving her work and mourning her loss. But Esther has never believed the official story. Now, after nearly sixty years of silence, she is finally ready to tell Vivian Salvatore what really happened.
Before she can place the evidence safely in Vivian’s hands, Esther is found dead in the same waters that claimed her sister.
The police see a grieving woman following Ruth into the bay. Yardley already has his tragic ending packaged for an audience. But Vivian sees a story assembled too quickly: missing pages, an unpublished poem, an influential foundation whose generosity reaches into every corner of the neighborhood—and people who have benefited from keeping quiet.
With coffee waiting at Coppa’s, two cats watching from her apartment, and her neighbors closing ranks around their own, Vivian follows the trail from a Green Street walk-up to the City Lights poetry room and the Aquatic Park seawall.
Someone has spent a lifetime deciding which women are remembered—and which disappear from the page.
To find Esther’s killer, Vivian must uncover what happened to Ruth before the past is rewritten one final time.
A Note for the Missing is the third atmospheric Telegraph Hill Mystery, featuring a midlife sleuth, a close-knit San Francisco neighborhood, literary secrets, and a mystery rooted in the stories history chooses to preserve.
Genre: Mystery
When true-crime podcaster Hollis Yardley arrives in North Beach searching for buried scandals, eighty-year-old Esther Vogel knows exactly which story he wants.
In 1968, Esther’s sister Ruth—a promising young poet—drowned at Aquatic Park. Her death was ruled a tragic accident, and a celebrated literary foundation has spent decades preserving her work and mourning her loss. But Esther has never believed the official story. Now, after nearly sixty years of silence, she is finally ready to tell Vivian Salvatore what really happened.
Before she can place the evidence safely in Vivian’s hands, Esther is found dead in the same waters that claimed her sister.
The police see a grieving woman following Ruth into the bay. Yardley already has his tragic ending packaged for an audience. But Vivian sees a story assembled too quickly: missing pages, an unpublished poem, an influential foundation whose generosity reaches into every corner of the neighborhood—and people who have benefited from keeping quiet.
With coffee waiting at Coppa’s, two cats watching from her apartment, and her neighbors closing ranks around their own, Vivian follows the trail from a Green Street walk-up to the City Lights poetry room and the Aquatic Park seawall.
Someone has spent a lifetime deciding which women are remembered—and which disappear from the page.
To find Esther’s killer, Vivian must uncover what happened to Ruth before the past is rewritten one final time.
A Note for the Missing is the third atmospheric Telegraph Hill Mystery, featuring a midlife sleuth, a close-knit San Francisco neighborhood, literary secrets, and a mystery rooted in the stories history chooses to preserve.
Genre: Mystery