Ada Nkem returns to Cypress Harbor, North Carolina, trading a fizzling set-design career in Atlanta for the quiet clang of hammers in her fledgling restoration studio, "Brightwork & Silver," tucked inside an old boatworks on Sparrow Lane. When the town’s Harbor Days regatta commissions her to polish a Colonial-era communion chalice newly acquired by the Historical Guild—a purchase brokered by the guild’s imperious chair, Eleanor Priddy, and a reclusive donor, Selene Voss—Ada spots crooked hallmarks and a telltale modern solder seam that shouldn’t exist. Hours later, during a gala in the refurbished ferry warehouse, Eleanor collapses and dies, and whispers about poison, theft, and old grudges rip through the crowd like a rip tide.
When her friend Jonah Beltrán, a soft-spoken choir director and part-time silversmith, is arrested—his fingerprints bright and clean on a jar of specialized polish, and his public argument with Eleanor still on half the town’s phones—Ada refuses to let him be the easy answer. She digs into Eleanor’s snarled deals and finds a coastline of suspects: developer Cade Talbot who wants the guild’s waterfront deed, rare-coin dealer Mireille Cho who once called the chalice a "once-in-a-generation" find, and guild treasurer Hank Dahl whose spreadsheets never add up. The chalice, Ada realizes, is a high-grade fake, the original swapped to grease someone’s pockets. With the cautious help of not-quite-boyfriend Deputy Theo March and her late grandmother’s poker partner, the razor-tongued Birdie Larkin, Ada stages a livestreamed appraisal to smoke out the thief. The trap snaps in the lighthouse bell tower, where a glinting flake of modern alloy, a misstruck hallmark, and the pattern of tarnish itself—the silver evidence—point unerringly to a killer who won’t hesitate to add Ada to the ledger.
