Some thefts are committed with a gun. The worst are committed with a pen.

Two days down a cold California coast, the old mission town of Santa Elena greets every stranger with a lie: a road that bends around nothing at all. Surveyor Silas Thorne reads it the moment he arrives—and he has come a long way, for a sealed parcel that has waited four years in the keeping of the parish priest.

By morning the priest is dead, his hundred-year-old map of the mission lands is gone, and the town is grieving a man the law will call a victim of his own failing heart. Silas knows better. He has seen this crime before: land lifted off its rightful owners not by force, but by a survey drawn from a north that isn't true—a fraud no court can find from the inside.

The thief took the only map of the old boundary. What he didn't understand is that for a hundred years, Santa Elena wrote its lands into its own baptisms, marriages, and burials. Christening by christening, dowry by dowry, Silas sets out to rebuild the stolen map from the parish's own memory—and to prove a murder hiding behind perfect paperwork.

And in a triple-locked chest in the church waits a sealed thing that may finally answer the question Silas has chased across a continent: what became of his father.

The Longitude of Loss is Book 7 of the Thorne & Linus: Cartographic Mysteries—atmospheric historical mysteries of the American frontier, where the truth is always in the ground, if you know how to ask it.