Mariner's Rest: Book One: Market Price

By Colin Linder

Ariel runs the front of house at a harbor-side seafood restaurant the way other people breathe - instinctively, precisely, without effort. She reads a room before she walks into it. She fixes problems before they exist. She has built two perfect systems: the floor she commands every night, and the life she comes home to, where Jack manages everything she doesn't have to think about.

When a voice from her past arrives in Halifax with nothing more than a request for coffee, Ariel begins to understand that a life without friction is not the same as a life without need. That being taken care of is not the same as being seen. That the most competent person in every room she enters has never once turned that skill on herself.

Set over one brutal Mother's Day service and the quiet months that precede it, *Market Price* moves between the controlled chaos of a professional kitchen and the harder, slower work of two people learning to be honest with each other. It is a novel about the difference between managing a life and living one. About what we owe the people who love us, and what we owe ourselves.

Some things have a fixed price. The ones worth having don't.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GQ4R3YXN
• ISBN13: 9798249755348
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"