When a sealed glass jar is unearthed beneath the cedar roots of Sehome Hill, the quiet town of Penrose is drawn into a mystery buried for nearly two centuries.
Inside the jar are a fragment of silver ore, a brass claim tag dated 1855, and a cipher no one can read. For bookseller and historian Ari Penrose, the discovery opens a door into Excelsior, the vanished mining settlement that existed before Penrose was born.
As Ari, Sophia Eden, Clair Finch, Mag Delancy, Jason Bloom, and the rest of the Penrose circle follow the clues from café tables to archive rooms, from old cemetery records to forgotten trails, one truth becomes impossible to ignore: Oliver Crowley did not simply disappear.
Someone erased him.
But the deeper the cipher leads, the more dangerous the past becomes. Because Crowley’s message was never about treasure.
It was testimony.
And someone in Penrose still wants it buried.
Genre: Mystery
Inside the jar are a fragment of silver ore, a brass claim tag dated 1855, and a cipher no one can read. For bookseller and historian Ari Penrose, the discovery opens a door into Excelsior, the vanished mining settlement that existed before Penrose was born.
As Ari, Sophia Eden, Clair Finch, Mag Delancy, Jason Bloom, and the rest of the Penrose circle follow the clues from café tables to archive rooms, from old cemetery records to forgotten trails, one truth becomes impossible to ignore: Oliver Crowley did not simply disappear.
Someone erased him.
But the deeper the cipher leads, the more dangerous the past becomes. Because Crowley’s message was never about treasure.
It was testimony.
And someone in Penrose still wants it buried.
Genre: Mystery
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for J Jasper North's The Silver Cipher