The Coroner's Inquest

The truth is in the record. Unless someone removes it first.

Two months after Ashgrove, Clara Hart has taken a room in a boarding house in Thornfield — suitcase under the bed, packed since December, the careful discipline of not looking back. She has survived. She intends to keep doing so.

Then the summons arrives.

Edward James Ashgrove — found dead on the grounds of his family estate — is to be examined in open court at last. Clara travels to Broughton expecting an accounting. What she finds is a county that knows how to make truth behave: a clerk discovered dead three nights before the inquest opens, the records office sealed, originals removed from official files, and witnesses who take the stand with rehearsed corrections. In the gallery, a London barrister watches with the patience of a man who already knows the verdict.

Clara still has her carbon copies. Six sets, out in the world, made with a nurse's exactness. But paper can be removed and replaced — and so can the people who insist on reading it aloud.

The Coroner's Inquest is a taut historical mystery set in 1924 England — for readers of Jacqueline Winspear, Frances Brody, and Anna Mazzola.