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I am the narrator of this book. I carried every soaked boot, every jangled key, every polite lie, and the entire corpse without so much as a thank-you; now they want me to smile and sell it too. Splendid.
Welcome to a Regency manor house mystery where order is a weapon, and Miss Cecilia Arden wields it like a teaspoon sharpened by necessity. She arrives at Larkspur Hall in December, boots and patience equally damp, to take a post that requires figures, nerve, and the ability to shut a front door in the face of Dorset itself. She has all three. She also has very little choice.
Naturally, the house greets her with holiday purgatory: wilting garlands, under-brushed footmen, guests with opinions about dust, and a viscount, Lord Ashford, who looks as if the building has tried to eat him before. Then the alarm bell clatters like a conscience, and the existing housekeeper turns up dead in the west passage by the linen press, blood on polished boards, her keys spilled like a small, accusing constellation.
From there, I get to watch Cecilia do what competent women always do, tidy the mess everyone else insists on making. She counts buttons, reads ledgers, listens to people who talk too smoothly, and discovers that Larkspur contains drafts, secrets, and a hidden passage that would like very much to pretend it is a ghost. It is not.
If she cannot prove what happened, she loses her livelihood, her hard-won respectability, and the only post that might keep her future from being "returned to sender."
Perfect for readers who like clue-forward manor house whodunits, hidden doors and sharper tongues, a prickly, hyper-competent heroine, and a viscount who learns that "consulting the housekeeper" is not an insult but a survival strategy.
A clue-rich, fair-play mystery with non-gory peril, plus a closed-door slow-burn romance and a guaranteed HEA, all in a stand-alone case you can read in any order. Go on then, click Look Inside and step through the door, just shut it properly behind you.
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