Message in the Manuscript (The Inn at Holiday Bay, #28)

A heartwarming cozy mystery series about losing everything, taking a chance, and starting again.

After suffering a personal tragedy Abby Sullivan buys a huge old seaside mansion she has never even seen, packs up her life in San Francisco, and moves to Holiday Bay Maine, where she is adopted, quite against her will, by a huge Maine Coon Cat named Rufus, a drifter with her own tragic past named Georgia, and a giant dog with an inferiority complex named Ramos. What Abby thought she needed was alone time to heal. What she ended up with was, an inn she never knew she wanted, a cat she couldn't seem to convince to leave, and a new family she'd never be able to live without.

In book 28 in the series, Abby finally has a moment to sit down with the manuscripts her friend Gayla left to her in her will and realizes that the murder Gayla wrote about in her stories might actually be a fictional accounting of the real unsolved murder that were still baffling police a decade after it was a front page story in the local news. The murder occurred when Abby was still living in San Francisco and it seems likely that Gayla had been witnessed to this high profile murder the way Roxy, the protagonist in her book, had been witness to a very similar murder in the story, but the more times Abby reads the script, the more certain she is that a fictional accounting of a very real experience might be exactly what she's looking at.

Meanwhile, Mylie and Jeremy are settling in as new parents, Georgia is still trying to come to grips with the ins and outs of the decision she made at Danny's welcome to the family party, and Abby makes a proposition to Bailey that could very well change both of their lives.