Black Truth

A fire. A dead man. A town that already knows who to blame.
When the Aldermoor Cannery burns on Midsummer Eve, the night watchman who loved it more than his own life is found among the ashes. By morning the police have a suspect. Elias Ashgrove, twenty-two, is a quiet, careful Black cannery worker who was dismissed that very week and was seen near the gates. Nobody in Saltwick Reach uses a harsh word. They say "that lad," lower their voices, and wait for the law to confirm what they have always assumed.
Inspector Marcus Tolliver is a listener. After twenty-nine years, he knows that a town's silence is never empty. As he follows it, the evidence leads him up the hill to the chairman who has quietly held half the district's secrets, and down into the homes of the people who kept them. There is a gentle vicar who cannot refuse a friend, a housekeeper with burned hands, a clerk's son who tells a lie, a pregnant girl who saw too much, and a mother who has spent thirty years writing the truth in letters she never posted.
Across thirty-six chapters, each a story in itself, Black Truth moves through a whole community as it learns what it saw, what it ignored, and what it was paid to forget. Love is hidden and betrayed. Friendships break. Families fracture around polite dinner tables, and a chairman's daughter must choose between her name and a promise made on a cliff-top in the dark.
Haunting, humane, and fiercely moral, this novel is about prejudice hiding behind good manners, debts money cannot pay, and the courage it takes to say a true thing aloud. It asks not only who lit the fire, but who stood in the doorway and watched, and what it costs, at last, to look back.