Mariner's Rest: Book 4: Side Work

By Colin Linder

Michaela has spent two years at the host stand at Mariner's Rest, watching the floor she wants to be on.

When a last-minute vacancy puts her in a server's apron for the first time, she discovers that knowing a room from the outside and knowing it from the inside are two entirely different maps.

The floor teaches her things no training shift could - how to read a table before anyone speaks, how to carry a tasting menu like a sequence rather than a list, how to listen to what a room is saying underneath the noise of what's happening in it. The kitchen teaches her more. And the people in the building - a precise and quietly generous bartender, a chef who communicates entirely through food, a line cook who calls her front until the night he doesn't - teach her what it means to build something worth staying for.

Then there is the man at table seven.

Kenneth Marsh. Twenty-seven. Quiet in the way that large men are sometimes quiet when they have decided to take up exactly the space they need and no more. He comes in every Saturday. Same table. Same wine. Always a book. He has been coming for three years and has never once talked to his server.

Until now.

*Side Work* is a novel about learning a craft, finding your place in a room, and what happens when the most interesting person in your section has been paying attention to you for longer than you knew.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GQ911Q5F
• ISBN13: 9798249808815
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"