THE Mystery OF CRANBOURNE HALL: A 1920s Historical Cozy

A solicitor dies quietly at a writing desk. Everything in the room says natural causes. Three small things say otherwise.Lady Marianne Cranbourne has spent five years in Florence cataloguing manuscripts for a scholarly foundation, and she comes home to Gloucestershire expecting dust, difficult relatives, and a crumbling estate to sort out. What she finds on her second morning is Mr. Aldous Fenn, her father's solicitor of thirty years, dead in the library on the day he was to read the will.The doctor signs the certificate. The inspector goes home. And Marianne, who has spent her working life noticing what does not belong, cannot stop looking at three things nobody else has thought worth a second glance: a locked dispatch case standing open and empty, a stack of papers arranged by somebody who did not understand the system, and the faint scent of orris root at a window that should have been shut.Everyone in the house has a reason to want that reading over with.A charming cousin with debts nobody knows about. An aunt with an eleven-year grievance against the dead man. A guest hiding correspondence he will not explain. A frightened secretary burning papers in a grate. And a land surveyor on the eastern boundary who will not say plainly who engaged him.With a coroner's certificate already signed and a burial four days away, Marianne has almost no time and no standing whatsoever. But she has a notebook, an archivist's training, and a village full of people who notice things: a postmistress with a registered post ledger, a housekeeper who knows which shelf every plate lives on, a groom who has greased the same wheel hub on a Thursday in July for forty-four years.What she uncovers is not a crime of passion. It is a piece of quiet bookkeeping, done by somebody who has never once in his life been made to bear a consequence.Set in a 1920s English village where the tea is good, the roses need deadheading, and every clue is carefully planted before the answer arrives, The Mystery of Cranbourne Hall is a fair-play British cozy mystery for readers who like their murders solved with patience and paperwork rather than car chases.Book One of the Lady Marianne Cranbourne Murder Mysteries.Scroll up and get your copy to open the library door at Cranbourne Hall.