Every Nora Halewell Time Travel Mystery book begins with a single question, and for The Sea-sexton’s Ledger, that question was: What happens when a village chooses silence over justice?
I’m so excited to share this eleventh book in the Nora Halewell Time Travel Mystery Series with you. It’s one of the most atmospheric stories I’ve written so far, and the research led me into the wild, wind-lashed coasts of the Orkney Islands, a place steeped in legend, weather, and long memory.
This time, Nora is pulled into the year 1776 via a shipwreck record book titled The Sea and the Silence. She finds herself washed ashore near the remote village of Rowndale, where a Royal Navy transport ship has disappeared without official report, and the locals insist nothing ever washed ashore. But, as always with Nora’s adventures, it’s never that simple.
What she uncovers is a story hidden beneath tides and names scratched from history: a secret tribunal, a sealed naval ledger, and a village complicit in a very quiet cover-up. The character of Mairenn—the sea-sexton herself—was inspired by the idea of a person who records death in a community that refuses to speak it aloud. Mairenn tends to burials, gathers driftwood markers, and holds onto names no one else will say.
This book is also about the weight of witnessing. Samuel Rendal, a survivor thought drowned, carries knowledge no one else wants to believe. And Nora, true to form, finds herself caught between truth and danger once more, armed only with a satchel of waterlogged records, a broken compass, and her moral compass, which never wavers.
Visually, I wanted this novel to echo the sea itself: unpredictable, rhythmic, and layered. You’ll find flickering lanterns in the fog, stone circles overlooking the cliffs, and coded messages hidden in a ship’s Bible. But at its heart, The Sea-sexton’s Ledger is a story about memory: what we choose to bury, and what won’t stay buried.
Writing Nora Halewell has been one of the great joys of my creative life. Each book lets me explore a different piece of history through her eyes, and this one felt particularly poignant. I’ve always been fascinated by historical omissions, those strange, quiet places in the archive where things have been deliberately left out. This story grew from that silence.
If you’ve journeyed with Nora from The Vanishing at Verdant Hall to now, thank you. And if this is your first entry into the series—welcome. Each book can be read on its own, though they connect in a deeper way as you go.
The Sea-sexton’s Ledger is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. I hope you enjoy stepping back into the past—fog, firelight, salt, secrets, and all.
👉 Read the book on Amazon
📚 And let me know what you think—I love hearing from readers.
Warmly,
Mandy
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