What do you do when the house you’ve inherited holds a secret the valley has been keeping for years — and the wrong man may already be paying for it?
Mira Ashworth arrives at Stonefall Hall with a single trunk, a dead husband’s surname she hasn’t decided to keep, and no particular plan beyond not going back to Leeds. The estate is hers — crumbling, cold, and full of rooms that feel like other people’s lives. The valley is beautiful in the way of things that have been keeping their own counsel for centuries. And the local constable, it turns out, resigned the week before she arrived.
She isn’t looking for a mystery. But a woman comes to the door with a lantern and grey eyes that have long since stopped having energy for anything except the truth. Her husband has been missing since January. A box buried in the paddock contains documents that could rewrite thirty years of local history. And someone in this valley is very certain that certain things should stay buried.
Mira notices things. She always has — quietly, carefully, without announcing it. She stores what she observes and waits for the right moment. It is a skill she has been using in other people’s service for thirty-one years.
Now, for the first time, what she notices belongs to her.
Can she find out what really happened in the paddock before January’s wrong is buried for good — and before the woman with the lantern loses the farm her family has worked for a hundred and sixty years?
A cozy historical mystery set in the Edwardian Eden Valley — atmospheric, character-driven, and quietly impossible to put down.
What the Valley Keeps is Book One of The Stonefall Mysteries. Books Two and Three are available now.
