When Will's restoration crew tears open a sealed wall in the boathouse wing of a granite family house on England's Isles of Scilly, they find something that should have drowned with a man forty years ago - and within days, the past has claimed a second victim. Claire Harmon and her husband Will have crossed to the remote island of Tresco so he can restore the Pengelly family's ancestral home, Carn Near House.
She expects a quiet working holiday. Instead she gets a house full of secrets, a family that flinches every time a decades-old wreck-diving death comes up, and - within days of the wall's discovery - the drowned body of the family's own archivist on the tidal sandbar below the house. With a summer storm grounding every flight and boat off the island, Claire is stuck inside Carn Near House with everyone who might have wanted the truth to stay buried: a mother whose alibi is suspiciously vague, a golden-boy grandson a little too calm for a man who's just lost his sister, and a ninety-one-year-old grandfather whose story about that long-ago drowning has never once changed in forty years - which, Claire has learned the hard way, is exactly the kind of story that usually isn't true.
Perfect for fans of Ann Cleeves, Lucy Foley, and Elly Griffiths.
When Will's restoration crew tears open a sealed wall in the boathouse wing of a granite family house on England's Isles of Scilly, they find something that should have drowned with a man forty years ago - and within days, the past has claimed a second victim. Claire Harmon and her husband Will have crossed to the remote island of Tresco so he can restore the Pengelly family's ancestral home, Carn Near House.
She expects a quiet working holiday. Instead she gets a house full of secrets, a family that flinches every time a decades-old wreck-diving death comes up, and - within days of the wall's discovery - the drowned body of the family's own archivist on the tidal sandbar below the house. With a summer storm grounding every flight and boat off the island, Claire is stuck inside Carn Near House with everyone who might have wanted the truth to stay buried: a mother whose alibi is suspiciously vague, a golden-boy grandson a little too calm for a man who's just lost his sister, and a ninety-one-year-old grandfather whose story about that long-ago drowning has never once changed in forty years - which, Claire has learned the hard way, is exactly the kind of story that usually isn't true.
Perfect for fans of Ann Cleeves, Lucy Foley, and Elly Griffiths.