Murder at Ashgrove Hall

Allen Lockridge's first published novel.

When a guest is found dead beneath an oak tree on the Ashgrove estate — no wound, no struggle, no satisfactory explanation — Constable Evers is prepared to call it misfortune and move on. The Hall has always managed its affairs quietly. The village has always understood the arrangement.

Clara Hart is not the village.

A former nurse with a trained eye and the particular stubbornness of a woman who has seen what happens when inconvenient deaths are allowed to become administrative matters, Clara arrived at Ashgrove Hall at the invitation of an old friend. She did not expect to find a dead man arranged with suspicious neatness in the frost. She did not expect to find a second man dying. She did not expect the house itself — its locked cabinets, its loyal servants, its smiling, immovable lady of the manor — to be quite so efficiently organized against her.

But the dead leave traces. Foxglove has a smell. And a great house built on secrets has rather more paperwork than it intends.

Set in the winter of 1923, Murder at Ashgrove Hall is a mystery in the finest tradition: a sealed world, a web of concealed identities, and a detective who fights not with dramatics but with ink, evidence, and the obstinate conviction that a thing written down cannot be entirely unmade.