The Inheritance of Ashes

Northumberland, 1873. Sir Edmund Crowhurst dies in the fire that consumes his mill, and leaves his three children a scorched estate, an impossible debt, and one charred ledger page naming a man none of them has ever heard of. Rosalind stays to hold the estate together. Thomas rides to London to reason with men who do not reason. Beatrice walks down to the mill village, where the fire began and the watchman died, and where nobody will meet her eye. What they find is not grief. It is arithmetic. A Victorian historical murder mystery of inheritance, complicity and three siblings who will never again be in the same room without counting what it cost. For readers of family sagas and slow-burning period crime.