When respected barrister Adrian Blackwell falls to his death from a fourth-floor window, probate genealogist Eleanor Vale expects another inheritance dispute.
Instead, she finds a name from her father's secret files.
Blackwell was one of the founders of a hidden organisation known as the Inheritance Circle, a network of lawyers, accountants, and estate professionals who spent decades helping vulnerable young people disappear into new lives. But someone is hunting the Circle's surviving members, and one by one they are dying.
As the bodies mount, Eleanor uncovers the story of Thomas Reed, a missing teenager whose identity was erased by a fraudulent death certificate while he was still alive. The deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that the murders are not acts of revenge. They are judgments delivered thirty-five years after a devastating mistake.
Then a shocking discovery changes everything.
Her missing father, Daniel Vale, was not investigating the Circle from the outside. He helped create it.
Now Eleanor must follow a trail of buried records, vanished witnesses, and long-hidden secrets leading to Ashcroft Manor, a place tied to a mystery so dangerous that people have spent decades killing to keep it buried.
Perfect for fans of British mysteries, amateur sleuths, family secrets, cold cases, genealogical investigations, and twist-filled crime fiction, A Name for the Dead is the gripping third novel in The Inheritance Files series.
Every family tree hides a grave.