At Pelican Point Estates, everyone knows how to smile for the camera. When a documentary crew arrives to film a polished portrait of the Gulf Coast retirement community, Margot Sterling wants nothing to do with it. She has already had enough attention after helping expose the truth behind more than one suspicious death. A camera crew, a carefully staged production schedule, and a producer asking too many friendly questions are exactly the kind of complications she would rather avoid. But Pelican Point has never been as peaceful as it looks. The crew says they are making a tasteful feature about reinvention, aging well, and the residents who have built new lives behind the gates. Then Margot notices the wrong things: a nervous glance before an interview, a file that should not exist, a story that changes depending on who is telling it. And then someone dies. The official explanation is tidy. Too tidy. The cameras captured plenty, but not the one thing that matters. Now Margot must sort through edited footage, old secrets, quiet lies, and the carefully managed image Pelican Point presents to the world. At the center of it all is a hidden file. The seventeenth file. Sixteen files point toward one man. The seventeenth points somewhere far more dangerous. As the truth comes into focus, Margot faces a question more troubling than who killed to keep the past buried: what happens when exposing the truth could destroy someone who has spent a lifetime surviving it? The Seventeenth File is Book Five in the Pelican Point series, an atmospheric mystery featuring retired Treasury investigator Margot Sterling, a sharp eye for hidden patterns, and a coastal community where every secret has a paper trail.