Oxford, England. 1925.
Nell Blackwood is nineteen, furiously intelligent, and invisible. The youngest daughter of a prominent academic family, she is expected to smile at dinner parties and marry well. She has other plans.
When a respected professor is found dead at the foot of his staircase, the police rule it an accident. Nell, who has known the family since childhood, is not so sure. Something about the grieving household doesn't sit right — 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, a once-celebrated detective who hasn't left his decaying North Oxford villa in ten years, crippled in the war and forgotten by the world. He is bitter, brilliant, and entirely uninterested in company.
She is his eyes and ears beyond the front door. He is the mind she is learning to match.
TheStaircase is a country house mystery and the first novel in the Fane & Blackwood series.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Nell Blackwood is nineteen, furiously intelligent, and invisible. The youngest daughter of a prominent academic family, she is expected to smile at dinner parties and marry well. She has other plans.
When a respected professor is found dead at the foot of his staircase, the police rule it an accident. Nell, who has known the family since childhood, is not so sure. Something about the grieving household doesn't sit right — 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, a once-celebrated detective who hasn't left his decaying North Oxford villa in ten years, crippled in the war and forgotten by the world. He is bitter, brilliant, and entirely uninterested in company.
She is his eyes and ears beyond the front door. He is the mind she is learning to match.
TheStaircase is a country house mystery and the first novel in the Fane & Blackwood series.
Genre: Cozy Mystery