The Keeper's Journal

A quiet Tuesday at the Everglades Historical Society ends with an empty shelf where a leather journal used to sit, donated years earlier by Game Warden Frank Harper under one strange condition, that no one grant access to it without first notifying the Sheriff's Office. Someone has broken that condition, and stolen the journal by giving a dead man's name at the front desk.

Sheriff Maxine “Max” Harper is called back to the town where her father once served, and finds that his journal was never just a private record. Buried inside his old notebooks is a name he never explained to her, Samuel Cross, a park resource worker who vanished in 1967 after reporting something he was never supposed to find, and whose personnel file was quietly altered in the years that followed.

Following her father's trail alongside deputies Ben and Melissa, Max uncovers a corroded sheriff's badge recovered from Cross's abandoned boat, a matching compass, and a final field notebook kept safe for decades by an old family friend who has clearly been guarding far more than paperwork. Every answer she finds only confirms that Frank was never working alone, and that someone still watching her investigation may know more about Samuel Cross than she does.

Carrying her father's satchel deeper into the Ten Thousand Islands, past Camp Thirteen and toward the wild country near Lostman's, Max begins to understand that Frank Harper spent his whole life protecting more than cases. He was protecting people history had already tried to forget, and passing that duty quietly forward, one keeper to the next, whether or not his own daughter ever agreed to accept it.

The Keeper's Journal is the second book in Howard Mark Hines' Everglades Files series, a Florida mystery of old secrets, quiet loyalty, and a father's final, unfinished lesson in what it truly means to remember someone.