Some retirements come with a gold watch. Maureen Reyes gets a ringing telephone that isn’t plugged into anything.

After twenty-six years working 911 dispatch — talking frightened callers through the worst nights of their lives — Mo retires to the one place she swore she’d never go back to: her late mother’s cottage on a small island in Lake Superior. The book opens the first night Mo unpacks, when a black rotary phone with no cord starts ringing, and the man on the other end is asking her to help him beat a storm that ended, and took him, three weeks earlier. What follows is the discovery that her mother wasn’t just a woman who kept to herself on a quiet island — she was the island’s Last Call Operator, a role passed down by blood, tasked with fielding calls from the recently dead and helping each one settle an unfinished want before their forty days run out. Mo inherits the job along with the cottage, the logbook, and a community of neighbors who all seem to know more than they’re saying: a retired coroner sitting on a sealed envelope, a harbormaster with three decades of records nobody’s ever asked to see, a ferry captain who knows exactly what that phone is for.

The book is the first entry in THE LAST CALL LINE series, structured around one case per installment with an ongoing season arc running underneath, and it suits readers who like their mysteries solved through competence rather than luck, their ghost stories grounded in real emotional stakes, and their small towns drawn specifically enough to feel lived-in. A slow-burn romance threads through with the island’s widowed harbormaster, kept deliberately unhurried — no kiss until book two — and the whole thing stays clean and closed-door throughout, without profanity, pairing its supernatural elements with warmth rather than dread.

The Pelican Atelier positions this one for readers who’ve worked through the cozy mystery shelf and want a bit more atmosphere without losing a small-town setting and a case that actually gets solved. Find it on Amazon →