Some secrets have been buried for five hundred years. Some for five days. Only one of them is murder.

Harmony Stone spent a couple of decades teaching history to teenagers. An occupation that requires you to make the long-dead vivid, the inconvenient truthful, and the wilfully bored actually care. She was rather good at it.

Now she's fifty-three, recently and amicably divorced, and living on her own terms house-sitting at Morning Cove Cottage, with a resident tortoiseshell cat called Carruthers, and a view of Mossington Manor in the valley below.

Designed in the Gothic Victorian style, complete with gargoyles on every gutter, Mossington is mid-restoration. Kingscombe itself is the kind of small town in Devon that knows every face and every secret. And the town has already decided, with characteristic warmth, to make Harmony one of its own.

Then Pete Greenslade, the Manor's master stonemason, is found dead.

The police call it an accident. Harmony calls it suspicious. Because thirty years of reading between the lines: of lesson plans, essays, and adolescent excuses, turns out to be remarkably useful preparation for reading a crime scene. And the evidence she finds suggests that more than one person wanted Pete out of the way.

With a reluctant ex-inspector for an ally, a cat with an unnerving interest in floorboards, and a town full of suspects who all seem to have something to hide, Harmony Stone begins to pull on a thread that runs all the way back to Roman times, and straight into the present.

She came to Kingscombe for a quiet life. She may have found something better.

A warmly witty, Christie-spirited mystery set on the Devon coast, with a heroine who proves the most dangerous person in any room is the one who listens.

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