SALE OR RETURN

Martin Beale kept proof of everything. That was the problem.

Will Hatcher believes that records, kept honestly, will tell you what happened, and he has spent his career being right about that more often than not. So when his old friend Martin Beale dies and leaves him to settle the estate, Hatcher takes four weeks of leave from his federal job in Washington, packs a yellow legal pad, and drives to Destin, Florida, expecting the work to be sad, slow, and simple.

Martin was a rare-book collector and an orderly man. His house on the Gulf is full of first editions, catalogs, ledgers, and receipts filed by year, and every one of them reconciles. Martin's daughter, Ruth, wants help getting through it. She manages a busy medical practice, has a grown son, and is ready to move forward.

Then a folded consignment receipt falls out of a reference book.

Fourteen years ago, Martin's wife, Susan, died in a fire at the the house. Ray Doran was convicted of setting it, and the State of Florida has scheduled his execution for a Thursday, four weeks away. Martin's testimony helped put him there. And a lawyer for the condemned man has asked the estate to preserve Martin's records.

The receipt is small. Four books. A dealer's stamp. A date that should not matter. But Hatcher has spent his life following small discrepancies to the place where they stop being small, and the estate's own files begin to raise a question nobody asked at trial. Every answer he finds is on paper, in under Martin's stamp. None of it says what Ruth needs it to say.

Ruth did not ask for any of this. She asked for help with her father's house. Now she has to watch Hatcher take her family's history apart one document at a time, while the clock runs toward a date neither of them has any power to move. She knew her father as a kind, careful, and funny man. The records describe someone else, or the same man from a side she never saw. She has to decide what she believes about her father, about Hatcher, and about the night her mother died.

And Hatcher has to decide what an honest man owes the record, when the truth may not set anyone free, cannot bring anyone back, and may cost him the one person he wants to stay for.

Sale or Return is a novel about grief and books, about the gap between what a family remembers and what its files can prove, and about the tenderness of two careful people finding each other in the middle of the worst month of their lives. It is, in places, funny too.

Set in the bright, salt-worn towns of the Florida Panhandle, it is quiet, exact, deliberate, and built to keep you turning pages until six o'clock on Thursday.

The second Will Hatcher novel, following Nobody's in Charge. Each book stands on its own.