The Sweetheart Swindle

Margot Slade is starting over. After her husband’s death revealed a financial fraud that took everything, the savings, the reputation, the life she thought she had, she’s landed in Agate Reach, Oregon, with a tuxedo cat, a Goodwill card table, and a determination to keep her head down.

That lasts about a week.

When Helen Pruitt, a recently widowed guest at June’s bed-and-breakfast, starts talking about the wonderful man she met online, a merchant marine officer who writes beautiful letters and always has a reason he can’t meet in person, Margot recognizes the pattern before anyone else does. The too-good-to-be-true attention. The carefully timed financial requests. The way the story never quite adds up.

Margot knows what a romance scam looks like. She married one.

But proving it means inserting herself into a community that doesn’t entirely know her yet, challenging a man who doesn’t exist, and following a paper trail that leads from a $13 stock photo to a network of shell companies. And when Helen is found at the bottom of the bluff stairs with bruises that don’t match a fall, the stakes shift from money to something much worse.

In Agate Reach, the fog hides more than the coastline. And Margot Slade is done letting scammers operate in the mist.