Part of Lady Darby Mysteries
First published 2018
Sebastian Gage has not walked through the doors of Langstone Manor in fifteen years. He had no plans to change that. But a desperate letter from his grandfather, the Viscount Tavistock, pulls Sebastian and his wife Lady Kiera Darby out of Dublin and onto the road to Devon in July of 1831. When they arrive, the Viscount is gravely ill and Sebastian's cousin Alfred has walked out onto the moors and never come back. The family blames the terrain. The Viscount suspects something worse. Then a second cousin, Rory, disappears the same way, and suspicion hardens into certainty. Kiera and Sebastian press into an investigation tangled with local superstition, strange sights that may not be what they seem, and the weight of Sebastian's own buried memories. He has told Kiera very little about his childhood here, and the manor keeps pulling those silences into the open. The moors are unforgiving, the answers are buried deep, and another life may already be running out of time.
Genres: historical-fiction, mystery, adult, adult-fiction, thriller, gothic
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, haunting, introspective, psychological, suspenseful
Tropes: buried-secrets, investigation-mystery, married-couple-detective, return-to-hometown
Setting: Langstone Manor, Devon, Dublin, The Moors
Period: 1831, July, 19th-century
375 pages · Paperback · Penguin Publishing Group
Content warnings: death