A Novel
"The death certificate was signed before the murder."
When county archivist Petra Cairn is digitising decades of civic records in the basement of Ashwick's municipal building, she finds something that stops her cold: a death certificate for a man named Lionel Speke, dated six days before Lionel Speke was killed in what police ruled a burglary gone wrong.
The certificate is complete — cause of death, time, location — and it is signed in the unmistakable copperplate of Dr. Edmund Favel, the county coroner. A coroner who has been dead himself for three years.
Compelled to dig further, Petra discovers a web connecting the coroner's office, a local solicitor, and a property development firm that has been quietly acquiring land in Ashwick for decades — land whose owners have a troubling tendency to die at convenient moments.
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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