The Shadow on the Board
In 1973, Reggie Thompson disappeared during a chess tournament in the Harrisford Public Library.
The lights went out. A window opened. A black knight fell on the board. When the room could see again, Reggie's chair was empty and the game was unfinished.
For decades, Harrisford called it a curse.
Ellie Carver knows better than to trust a town's favorite explanation.
When Victor Langley is found dead by the pier with a black knight clenched in his hand, his daughter Abigail asks Ellie to come to Harrisford and look at the case before the official answer hardens into another convenient lie. Ellie expects old grudges, bad records, and a dead man's paranoia. What she finds is an antique chessboard that has been treated like a relic, a club full of people protecting different versions of the past, and a position on the board that seems to point toward something far worse than superstition.
Then Ellie's missing brother Jamie begins to appear inside the evidence.
Old maps. Hidden doors. Harbor records. Burned papers. A vanished route called Hollow Lane. The Harbor Queen. Dockside Salvage. A boy who ran. A man who finally came back. Every clue leads deeper into a cold-case structure built from smuggling, fear, money, silence, and the false comfort of calling murder a ghost story.
To uncover what happened to Reggie, Victor, and Jamie, Ellie must read the board the way Harrisford never wanted it read: not as a curse, but as a record.
The Shadow on the Board is a literary mystery thriller about a cursed chessboard that may not be cursed at all, a coastal town built around silence, and a woman forced to follow the last move her brother left behind.
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