In Confidence

Harriet Ashdown knows the City of London the way only a person who works in its small streets can. As a mediator who left the Bar to spend her days helping firms and partners find the words they could live with, she has built a quiet, careful life in the quarter-square-mile ward of Walbrook - the office on Bow Lane, the flat above her aunt's antiquarian print shop on Aldersgate Street, the bench at St Stephen Walbrook where she eats her lunch in the rain.
At forty-two, divorced, mostly content, she has settled into the rhythms of a woman who has decided not to expect more. When the body of a retired man named Giles Pettifer is found by the river one Friday morning, Harriet has reasons of her own to take an interest. Giles had quietly belonged to a small society of City men - eight or twelve at most - that meets weekly in a private room beneath an old pub on St Michael's Alley.
Her uncle is one of them. So is the man she has, against her better judgment, begun to find herself thinking about. The members of the society do not advertise themselves, and they do not, by long custom, explain what they do. They have been meeting in the same room since the 1880s, and they intend to keep meeting in it, and they would prefer she did not ask. Harriet asks anyway. What she finds is not the conspiracy a younger version of her would have expected.
It is something stranger and quieter - a tradition with its own grammar, its own grades of seriousness, its own small acts of care that have been performed in that room by particular men on particular Wednesdays for a very long time. The closer she gets to who killed Giles and why, the closer she gets to a question the brothers themselves have been failing to ask: what is the chamber for, and what does it cost the men who keep it?In Confidence is part of the Good Neighbors Mysteries, a cozy mystery series set in real towns where ordinary lives, close-knit communities, and well-kept local histories lead to mysteries with more beneath the surface than first meets the eye.
Warm, thoughtful, and gently surprising, these are stories about place, connection, and the neighbors who make a town what it is.