UNPUBLISHED

A mother will do anything for her son. Jan Vale just happens to be rather good at asking questions.

When Jan Vale receives an urgent call from her son Daniel, she leaves Penraven behind and travels with Moss to the Kent coast. Daniel has discovered the body of a woman he has been seeing-and the police have questions.

The woman Daniel knew as Sophie was not who she claimed to be.

As suspicion begins to settle around her son, Jan does what she has always done best: watches, listens and notices the things other people overlook. In a busy seaside town where nobody knows her, an older woman walking a friendly dog attracts remarkably little attention.

And Moss attracts everyone else.

But Sophie's secrets extend far beyond Daniel.

Her real identity leads to a carefully planned theft, an unpublished manuscript and the extraordinary story of an eighteenth-century female privateer known as the Widow. Hidden within an old captain's log are coded passages that have remained unsolved for two hundred years-and may contain clues to the fate of her ship, The Widow's Fortune, and the riches supposedly lost with it.

Someone wanted those secrets badly enough to pay for them.

But did they want them badly enough to kill?

With Daniel's future hanging in the balance, Jan must separate one crime from another and discover whether Sophie's death was connected to the treasure she was trying to steal-or to somebody she had deceived long before she ever met Daniel.

Along the way there are windswept walks, unlikely friendships, an unimpressed cat called Pickle, far too much concern about whether Daniel has eaten properly, and Moss doing what Moss does best: reminding people that even in the darkest moments, life carries on.

Because Jan may be miles from Penraven, but she is still a librarian.

She is still a mother.

And she still knows that the most important part of any mystery is asking the right question.

UNPUBLISHED is the fourth Jan Vale Mystery from Robert Porter-a warm, character-driven British mystery about family, deception, history and the secrets people believe they have successfully buried.