Shadows on Church Street

By: Justine Jacobs

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Retired travel photographer Clara Whitcombe came to Charleston for the azaleas and the architecture. She expected to spend her days capturing the city's legendary beauty through her lens while her loyal companion Atlas—a German Shepherd–Great Pyrenees mix with instincts sharper than any human's—padded contentedly at her side. But when Clara joins a historic walking tour through the French Quarter, her camera catches something she was never meant to see: a shadow moving in the window of an abandoned carriage house. Hours later, a real estate heir is found dead inside that same building, murdered in a way that speaks of careful planning and deep, personal hatred.

Now Clara finds herself entangled in a web of old Charleston money, family secrets, and simmering resentments that span generations. As she navigates a world of society luncheons and forgotten properties, of charming facades hiding ugly truths, she discovers that everyone connected to the victim had reason to want him dead. A passed-over sister. A preservation architect whose family home was bulldozed. A cheated business partner. An activist fighting to save her neighborhood. Even the victim's own mother harbored secrets behind her gracious smile.

With the police viewing her as a person of interest and a killer who may have seen her taking photographs, Clara must use every skill she's developed in forty years behind the camera—the patience, the eye for detail, the instinct for the telling moment—to uncover the truth before she becomes the next victim. In a city where history and scandal intertwine like Spanish moss on a live oak, some secrets refuse to stay buried. And some shadows, once seen, cannot be unseen.