A Novel
"The death certificate was signed before the murder."
The certificate is signed in copperplate. The date is wrong by six days. The coroner has been dead for three years.
When county archivist Petra Cairn unearths the document in the basement of Ashwick’s municipal building, she reports it to the police as she’s trained to do. DCI Holt calls it a clerical error. Her supervisor tells her to flag it and move on. Petra does neither.
What she finds instead is a pattern. Three death certificates, signed and filed in perfect sequence, each describing a death that had not yet happened. Each death followed. Each death made money for the same quiet firm of solicitors. And the late Dr. Edmund Favel, a man of impeccable reputation, left his paper trail for one specific kind of reader — the kind who reads every page.
Then blank certificates begin arriving in Petra’s post. Her name is already typed at the top.
A quiet, meticulous novel about bureaucracy and violence, about the patience of records, and about a woman who will not be talked out of what she has seen.
Order NowAshwick, Cotswolds. Every mystery Petra Cairn uncovers begins the same way — in the basement archive, in the order of things, in a filing sequence that someone disturbed.
Nicola Graves does not give interviews. She does not attend literary festivals. She does not maintain a public profile beyond the one you are currently reading.
What is known: she spent the better part of two decades working in records management and archival administration for local government. She has a precise understanding of filing systems, bureaucratic procedure, and the particular silence that descends on institutions when something has gone wrong but no one has yet noticed.
She lives in England. She prefers not to say where.
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