When Beatrice Vale inherits a house in Dorset, she also inherits something far less tangible: a village determined to treat her as though she has done something wrong.

No one will say what.

No crime has been committed. No accusation has been made. Yet invitations are withdrawn, old loyalties close ranks, and one room in Vale House has remained locked for nearly twenty years.

Enter Lord Peregrine Finch.

Peregrine expects a mystery with a single answer. What he finds instead is a tangle of facts: an empty chair, missing letters, a lantern on the cliff, suspicious footprints, an old boathouse, a family quarrel, and several people each protecting a different truth.

The difficulty is not discovering what happened.

It is discovering which facts actually belong to the same story.

A witty country-house mystery about grief, inheritance, memory, and the danger of forcing every clue into one elegant theory.

Because sometimes the hardest part of solving a mystery is knowing what not to connect.