The Sleaford Cipher
Some records are kept. Some are buried.
Eleanor Finch has spent eighteen months cataloguing the archive at Old Sleaford Manor, and she has learned which doors are not for her. Then a thirteenth volume turns up wedged behind the others - not a ledger at all, but a Georgian diary describing a folly built in 1787 that appears on no map, no register, and no surviving record of the estate.
Beneath the entry, in a smaller and more careful hand, someone has left a riddle.
It leads her to a mirror in the east wing, and from there to a floor plan of a room that does not officially exist. But when Lord Alistair Croft summons her to his study, he already has the evidence on his desk - and he tells her the trail was laid deliberately, thirty years ago, as a test of who could be trusted to stop looking.
She has failed it.
Dismissed, burgled, and given until morning to leave the grounds, Eleanor has one night, an elderly housekeeper with a key she copied three decades ago, and a police inspector she isn't sure she can trust. What waits in the sealed chamber beneath the chapel is not treasure. It is a land deal, a coroner's signature that was bought, and the name of a young woman who drowned in 1962 - and who did not drown at all.
A tightly wound British mystery of archives, inheritance and buried crime - for readers of Elly Griffiths, Kate Ellis, and Susan Hill's The Various Haunts of Men.
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