THE BLACKTHORN CIPHER

THE BLACKTHORN CIPHER The Marlowe Cipher Series, Book One by Nikita Shinde Her grandfather left her almost nothing,except a locked chest, a warning, and a one-way ticket to the island where her mother vanished. Ivy Marlowe restores rare manuscripts for a living. She spends her days making sense of other people's secrets. She has never been able to make sense of her own: twenty years ago, her mother walked into a private archive on a remote Scottish island and never walked out. No body. No answers. Just a hole in Ivy's life shaped like a woman she barely remembers. Now her grandfather is dead too,officially an accident, and Ivy believes that exactly as much as she believed the official story about her mother. His will leaves her a cedar chest, a brass cipher wheel, and four words in his handwriting: trust no one who knows. The ferry to Skerrow carries her toward a shuttered manor called Blackthorn Hall,and toward Gabriel Reyes, a stranger who knows far too much about her family for a man who claims to be nobody. He's careful. He's guarded. He's hiding something behind every charming deflection. And he is, infuriatingly, the only person on this storm ,locked island Ivy finds herself wanting to trust. As the cipher wheel gives up its secrets one turn at a time, Ivy uncovers the truth her grandfather spent thirty years burying: a secretive society, a family fortune built on other people's stolen history, and a mother who didn't disappear by accident. Someone silenced Celeste Marlowe. And the man sent to stop Ivy from finishing what her mother started may be the one person standing between her and the same fate. With a storm cutting off her only way home and a gunman closing in on the one truth Blackthorn Hall was built to hide, Ivy has one week to decide how much of her family's darkness she's willing to survive,and whether the man she's falling for is her way out, or the last lie standing between her and the truth. The Blackthorn Cipher is Book One of a five-part romantic suspense saga where every answer opens a darker question ,building to one impossible truth, finally revealed in Book Five.