A Village on a Deadline: The Drowned Parish Is in Final Edits!!

I'm excited to announce that book three is in final edits!

Hartwell is fictional. The circumstance is not.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reservoir schemes across England and Wales required whole communities to give up homes, farms, roads, churches, and burial grounds. A water undertaking took its powers from a private Act of Parliament. The Act carried compulsory purchase, a supply date owed to towns elsewhere, and its own provisions for removing the dead. Once it passed, no local objection could reach the timetable.

Moving the dead was part of the work. Notices, permissions, records, new coffins, transport, reburial on higher ground. Consent came from the church courts where the ground was consecrated and from the Home Office where it was not. The process was practical on paper. It was something else in the churchyard, where families who had already buried someone once watched the burial disturbed on a schedule set by engineers.

The other half of the book is the influenza.

The last wave ran through the winter and spring of 1919, after the autumn deaths most people remember. In the worst weeks, clergy, parish clerks, nurses, and undertakers worked through deaths faster than ordinary procedure could hold. Registers were kept. Burials were entered. But the people making those records were ill, exhausted, frightened, or working beyond their proper roles. An error made then could persist for years because everyone had reason to accept the simplest explanation and move on to the next death.

The Book

 Spring 1924. Somerset County. The village of Hartwell has a fortnight before the sluice drops.

A district nurse attends every lifting in the churchyard. On a Tuesday, a coffin comes up that has been five years in the ground under a young woman's name, and the wrong person is inside it. She writes to the only person she thinks will take her seriously.

Clara Hart goes west on the morning train.

That is as much as I intend to say.

Where It Stands

The structure, clues, and ending are set. I am not reopening them.

What is left is the slow pass. Dialogue read aloud. Second sentences cut where the first one did the work. Places where a character explains something to the reader instead of hiding it from another character. And the timetable, checked line by line, because in a book about a fixed schedule a reader who catches me losing a day is entitled to stop trusting me.

Then proofs and the cover finalization.

The paperback is registered for 2026. When there is a date and a link, it goes up here and to the mailing list first.

The Series

Book One, Murder at Ashgrove Hall. A winter gathering at a country estate turns deadly, and Clara finds a household set on settling the story before the authorities arrive.

Book Two, The Coroner's Inquest. What happens to a truthful witness in a room built for other purposes?

Book Three, The Drowned Parish. A wrong body, a right memory, and a valley with a date on it.

I can't wait to share this with you!

-Allen