The Staircase

Oxford, 1925. A professor dead at the foot of his staircase. The police call it an accident. Nell Blackwood calls it something else entirely.

Nineteen years old, furiously intelligent, and expected to smile at dinner parties and marry well - Nell has other plans. And when a family she has known since childhood begins to fracture under the weight of a grief that doesn't quite ring true, she can't stay quiet.

The wife whose hands never tremble. The daughter who doesn't sleep. The son who wasn't even in the house.

She takes what she's seen to the one person who might understand it: Roderick Fane. Once celebrated, now forgotten - a brilliant detective who hasn't left his decaying North Oxford villa in ten years, crippled by the war and by something harder to name.

He is bitter, sharp, and entirely uninterested in company.

She is about to change that.

She is his eyes and ears beyond the front door. He is the mind she is learning to match.

The Staircase is the first Fane & Blackwood Mystery - classic detective fiction with dark edges, set in 1920s Oxford. Perfect for fans of Jacqueline Winspear and Anthony Horowitz.