The Hollow Crown Is Not a Crown

In 1948 the coronation ring of Aldery was replaced with a forgery. For seventy-five years the country's good weather, quiet borders and uneventful politics have rested on a lie nobody knew they were telling. Archivist Ruth Salter proves it in a footnote. Her reward is a dead supervisor, a locked reading room, and a police inspector named Vane who does not believe in magic and does believe in ledgers. Behind the forgery is a file: the palace, a mining company, and an entity recorded only as the Tenants, who have been honouring a lease for two generations and now want it renewed. The wall is failing. The weather is wrong. And the only way out of a nine-hundred-year contract is to read every line of it, on the record, in public. A classic high fantasy contemporary fantasy thriller about paperwork, weather, and the end of a monarchy.