Schwendstein – Inheritance of Blood. The Inheritance Cycle, #1

Schwendstein - Inheritance of Blood opens the Inheritance Cycle, a series of gothic-investigative novellas exploring the hidden architectures of power that shape Europe's oldest estates. Each installment stands alone while contributing to a larger constellation of crimes, legacies, and the quiet forces that bind families to the shadows they inherit. In this first novella, forensic investigator Markus Adler is summoned to the remote Schwendstein estate in Bavaria, expecting a routine inquiry.
Instead, he uncovers a ledger chronicling centuries of killings disguised as noble succession. With legal archivist Catrina von Dietingen at his side, Markus traces a pattern of altered testimonies, coerced silence, and ritualized inheritance that has allowed the Baron's family to maintain dominion through fear. When a new death fractures the castle's uneasy calm, the investigation shifts from historical reconstruction to immediate peril.
Evidence disappears, alliances shift, and the estate's past presses violently into the present. Markus and Catrina must confront a lineage determined to preserve its authority at any cost. As the cycle begins, Inheritance of Blood establishes the thematic spine of the series: the collision of forensic truth with ancestral myth, the weight of legacy, and the question of what must be broken for justice to take root.