Tess Nakamura is very good at reading the past. As Sausalito's city archivist, she catalogs old photographs, maintains municipal records, and knows the history of every building on Caledonia Street. What she's less good at is reading the present ? noticing that the town she loves is changing around her, that the people she trusts are keeping secrets, and that two concrete elephant statues in the downtown plaza are doing something that concrete statues should not be able to do.
When a respected community leader dies under circumstances everyone accepts too quickly, Tess finds herself applying her professional skills to a very different kind of record: the living, unfolding story of a town in trouble. A cancelled meeting. A cleaned desk. A trail through property records that leads somewhere she doesn't want it to go. And a pair of statues from a 1915 world's fair that seem to know, in their own slow and impossible way, that something in Sausalito has gone deeply wrong.
Third-generation Japanese-American, granddaughter of a woman who survived internment and returned to rebuild her life in the same town that removed her, Tess has always assumed Sausalito would take care of itself. The investigation teaches her otherwise ? that the things worth keeping are the things you have to actively protect, and that an archivist who only reads the past is only doing half the job.
The Threshold Guardians is set in the real streets, floating homes, and waterfront plazas of Sausalito, California, and is part of the Good Neighbors Mysteries, a cozy mystery series set in real towns where ordinary lives, close-knit communities, and well-kept local histories lead to mysteries with more beneath the surface than first meets the eye. Warm, sharp-eyed, and gently strange, these are stories about place, attention, and the neighbors who make a town what it is.
