The Faithful: A Cozy Paranormal Mystery - Thornhaven Mysteries, Book Two

In 1843 a convict was flogged past the lawful count and died three days later. The station surgeon wrote one word over him in the register. Fever.He knew it was a lie as he wrote it.Thomas Carey was charged with helping a man escape. He never helped anyone escape. He was a hedge-school teacher who said the old prayers over dying men, and he was hiding something worth fifty lashes and a lie in a register to keep buried.He took the where of it to his grave.A hundred and eighty years later, Dr Tess Ashburn has almost convinced herself she can keep the dead at arm's length.Then a heritage researcher arrives from Melbourne with a family rosary of worn bog oak beads. Tess has her gloves off. She picks it up.Mary Doyle gave her sensation. This is not that. This is a man reaching for her on purpose, and when she sets the beads down, he does not let go.The one record that would prove what was done to him should be in a box in Hobart. It was catalogued in the eighties. A careful scholar quoted a line of it in a footnote. It is not on the shelf now, and catalogued documents do not walk out of managed archives on their own.Somebody in Thornhaven has been quietly requesting these files for years.Whatever Thomas Carey hid is still out there. Tess is not the only one looking for it. And everything she truly knows, she knows by touching things, which means she can never put a word of it in front of a heritage board or a police sergeant.Then, in a paddock at the edge of her vision, a man stands very still and watches her work.Nobody else can see him. He has been at the edge of her vision since her first case, and he is not waiting for Thomas Carey.He is waiting for her.The Faithful is Book Two of The Thornhaven Mysteries, a completed seven-book paranormal cozy mystery series set on Tasmania's Tasman Peninsula, near Port Arthur.Perfect for readers who love: dual timeline historical mysteries - Australian convict and colonial history - Irish transportation and family history - a ghost who wants something - a forensic anthropologist turned amateur sleuth - small-town cozy mystery with no gore and no cliffhangers.Every book solves its own case. Together they build to something almost two hundred years in the making. All seven release through 2026.