The Will Takers: Book Two A Witness, Lightly Disguised STEPHEN WARD
A clear will. A patient man. And the long, lawful, courteous unpicking of a dead man's last wish.
No one is murdered. The weapon is procedure.
Good call - "trust the reader" means leaning into the conceit. The book's own bargain (you know the end before the beginning) becomes the hook. That's the braver choice and it self-selects for exactly the reader who'll love this book. I'll give you the full set so you have everything the KDP listing fields and the A+ Content module can take.
A note on how this works mechanically: the book description is the field that appears on the product page (KDP allows up to 4,000 characters and accepts limited HTML for bold/line breaks). The tagline and bullets are for A+ Content or the top of the description. I've written everything in your British English and kept it free of hype-words and false promises, matching the book's own restraint.
1. Tagline / hook line
(One line. Use it at the very top of the description, on the cover, or as the A+ banner text.)
You will know how it ends before they do. That is the cruelty, and the bargain, of this book.
Two alternatives, if you want a different register:
A clear will. A patient man. And the long, lawful, courteous unpicking of a dead man's last wish.
No one is murdered. The weapon is procedure.
2. Short blurb
(≈50 words. For ads, metadata, or the "editorial review" slot. Punchy.)
A hill farmer leaves his daughters a farm, and a will so clear no honest person could mistake it. It is not the will that fails. Over five courteous years, a family is taken apart in writing - and only a stranger with a dog thinks to check the foundation.
3. Full book description
(For the main KDP description field. Written to mirror the book's own conceit - the reader is let into the secret, exactly as the prologue does it. Formatted with the bold/spacing KDP accepts.)
There is a letter on a desk in a grey northern town, and it will never be sent.
Begin with that, because it is the end - and in this book you are allowed to know the end before the beginning. That is the bargain. You will see everything the daughters cannot. And you will be unable to lift a finger.
Arthur Brand died and left his four daughters a hill farm, and a will written so plainly that no honest person could mistake what he meant. He was right about that. It could not be argued with. That was never going to be the problem.
The problem was the people.
No one is murdered in these pages. There is no knife, no stair, no scream in the night. The weapon is procedure. The weapon is delay. The weapon is the slow, patient, professional work of turning a clear thing into a matter to be considered - and then considering it, gently, expensively, for years, until a family that was once as whole as a hand is torn down to the bone.
And the cruellest part, the part you must carry furthest: the thing that would have ended it all was true, and provable, and sitting in plain sight the entire time. It was disclosed. It passed through every hand in the case. And it did not matter - because the machine was never built to find the truth. It was built to be survived.
Then a man comes over the hill in the rain, with a dog, and asks the one question thirty years of policing taught him to ask before any other: did anyone ever actually check?
The Will Takers is a novel about how an ordinary, decent, lawful system can ruin a family without a single wicked person anywhere inside it - and about the two daughters, and the one stubborn outsider, who refused to let it finish its work.
A true thing, lightly disguised. Read carefully.
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