The Stonefall Mysteries: Book Seven

A name. Nothing more.

Eight months after the discovery that closed one family's oldest wound, Stonefall has learned exactly how little a single word can hold — and exactly how far a household willing to look will go to fill in the rest. When a stranger arrives at the gate one September morning, dust of eleven miles on her boots and her late grandmother's diary wrapped in oilcloth under her arm, she brings Mira and Philip Vane the first real thread in a search that has gone nowhere for the better part of a year: a girl named Sarah, a dairy, a departure — and then a hundred and twenty years of silence.

The trail that follows will take the household further than any case has taken them before — past the edge of the Eden Valley entirely, into a remote dale where the nearest neighbor is measured in moorland rather than streets, where a farm ledger kept by three generations of the same family might hold the only proof left that a woman most of the world forgot to keep a record of ever lived at all.

It will take a fourteen-year-old's steady hand reading a name by touch on a stone too worn to read by sight. It will take a widow's memory, sixty years held and never once asked for. It will take a household that has learned, case by case, book by book, that the questions worth asking are rarely the ones that arrive with an easy answer attached — and that sometimes the truest thing you can do for someone the world let go quiet is simply to write them back down, carefully, in a place where they'll stay found.

Because a family's record is only as good as its willingness to go back and finish what it started. And the valley — patient, watchful, keeping its own kind of ledger — has never once stopped waiting for someone to ask it the right question at the right time.

Sarah has been missing for a hundred and twenty years.

Stonefall has all the time in the world to bring her home.