The Devil's Chart

Cora Finch was raised to read the sea the way other people read a letter. Her father was the finest chartmaker in the colony, until the morning they pulled him out of the harbor and called it an accident. Cora never believed it, and she believes it even less once she finds the chart he left behind, with a cipher hidden in its compass rose that only the two of them were ever taught to read. A mapmaker does not drown for drawing coastlines. He drowns for drawing the truth.

Everyone wants that chart. They think it maps a fortune. When she tries to run with it, the ship she flees on is taken by the most feared privateer in the Narrow Sea, a man the Crown branded a butcher and set five hundred guineas on, dead or alive. Captain Ransom Locke should cut her throat and take her father’s work. Instead he keeps her, because he has been hunting the same truth for three years, since the day it cost him his brother.

He knows how the killing was done. Cora knows how to read the map to the proof of it. And the man who owns the answer to both of them is the one the whole colony toasts, the knight whose name is carved above the almshouse door, the most honored gentleman in Port Argent. They think Cora is only the girl who colors other men’s charts. They have not understood yet that a map remembers everything a ledger tries to forget, and that no reputation, however gilded, can outrun a course laid straight and true.

The Devil’s Chart is a standalone Age-of-Sail dark romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.