Old papers hide dangerous secrets. Old houses hide even more.

Eve Brook, literary consultant and newly minted sleuth, expects a peaceful autumn: a hunt for ‘Hobbit gold’ in the papers of a forgotten contemporary of Tolkien and Lewis.

Instead, in a crumbling Victorian villa in Oxford’s Norham Manor, she uncovers unsettling truths about her city’s past, disturbs an unquiet ghost, and crosses paths with someone hiding secrets of his own.

New Year, and an invitation to a house party in a Jacobean manor deep in the Chilterns, offers a welcome escape; a few days to forget the musty papers and the darkness they reveal in a setting straight from the pages of her beloved crime fiction.

But then, the body is found.

Only months after her first case, Eve Brook is pulled into a new murder inquiry far more personal, and far more dangerous, than anything she’s encountered before. And this time, she must uncover the truth before the killer strikes again.