Before the Scarlet Season

A scarlet ribbon should mean nothing more than silk. For seamstress Maura Kelleher, it carries a message from a past Emerald Harbour has spent years trying to bury:Not dead. Hidden. Vale lied. Scarlet Season begins. Hours later, a clerk is discovered murdered inside the Vale shipping warehouse with a fragment of a ledger in his hand. Maura has survived by noticing what other people overlook-the secrets tucked into hems, pockets, household accounts and conversations men assume women are too busy sewing to hear.
Now those skills lead her toward records that should not exist. With the watchful Liam Reilly beside her, Maura follows a trail through shipping books, parish archives, hidden rooms and the memories of women whose testimony was never considered important enough to enter the official record. What they uncover reaches far beyond one murdered man. Missing labourers. Stolen identities. Families paid to remain silent.
Children moved under false names. A system powerful men have protected by turning human lives into numbers on a page. And somewhere inside those records may be the truth about Maura's own family. But records survive. Witnesses survive. And Emerald Harbour is beginning to remember. Before the Scarlet Season is an atmospheric Irish historical novel of mystery, family, institutional power, community resistance and the dangerous consequences of refusing to let the official record have the final word.