The Cathedral

A weathered photograph left behind in her father's things sends Sheriff Maxine “Max” Harper into the Ten Thousand Islands south of Goodland, toward a hidden mangrove church known only as the Cathedral. A guarded letter from Will Tigertail, whose family has kept these waters and their secrets long before Frank Harper ever carried a badge through them, tells her only that someone has broken into the little church and gone straight to a hiding place behind its walls, one Frank himself found decades earlier and chose never to disturb.

What the Cathedral once held were the quiet records of storm-battered families, names written down by people sheltering after hurricanes, entries that meant nothing to strangers and everything to the people who wrote them. Decades earlier, one of those entries became the center of a disputed land transfer, after a man who tried to challenge it went out on the water one ordinary morning and never came home, his boat later found drifting undamaged in a mangrove creek with nothing to explain where he had gone.

As Max, Chet, Zeb, and Hank follow her father's careful, restrained investigation back into the backcountry, they discover that whoever broke into the Cathedral this time knew exactly what they were looking for, and that the line Frank once drew between proving a wrong and exposing a family's private history may not hold for whoever is searching for it now.

The Cathedral is the fourth novel in Howard Mark Hines' Everglades Files series, a Ten Thousand Islands mystery about a church nobody built to last, a family's disappearance nobody ever explained, and a daughter learning exactly how far her father was willing to go to protect what other people were never meant to lose.