Heavy Going

A stranger asked to read the stud book. By morning he was dead in the horse pond.

Hartsmere Stud, August 1890. The yearling sales are a fortnight off, and Nell Ashmore has bred the best colt in the county. When bloodstock agent Samuel Frome asks to examine her covering records before his client bids, she hands him the archive without hesitation. Hartsmere has nothing that will not survive an honest reading.

She is wrong.

Frome is found drowned at dawn in three feet of water, in a pond behind a gate that is always locked - with the key back on its hook, signed for in the tack-room log, in a hand Nell has trusted every day for two and a half years.

Inspector Thomas Kell rules out accident within the hour. What follows is not a hunt for a stranger but a slow, unbearable reading of Nell's own household: her trainer, her stableman, her housekeeper, the boy she half raised. Because whatever Frome found, he found it in her paper - one scraped leaf in a foundation register, one corrected date, a lie so old that every horse the yard has sold in her lifetime traces its pedigree straight through it.

To catch a killer, Nell must be willing to break the thing she has spent four years rebuilding. To prove the fraud, she must publish it. And the closer she reads, the more clearly she sees the shape of the argument that made a good man into a murderer - an argument her own family invented, a generation before he was born:

Hartsmere must survive, and therefore somebody must be sacrificed.

HEAVY GOING is the fourth Hartsmere Mystery - a cleanly-plotted, fair-play Victorian whodunnit for readers who like their clues in the paperwork, their detectives in a riding habit, and their country houses hiding something older than the body.

The Hartsmere Mysteries: The Favourite · Long Odds · The Stalking Horse · Heavy Going