A village that doesn’t want to be found. People who vanish and are never missed. And someone’s been keeping it that way a long time.
For twenty years Eleanor Finch took fraudulent insurance claims apart for a living. The same day she was made redundant, a letter appeared in her bag: postmarked, addressed to her, never delivered. It offered work in a Suffolk village she could find almost nothing about.
Brackenmere is postcard-pretty, with stone cottages and lanes that have opinions about where you are going. The insurance office runs on paper, rotary telephones and a pen that writes by itself. The claims defy every principle Eleanor has ever worked by.
Then she finds the folder the last investigator hid before she vanished. A cottage on Willow End, empty for eight years. Every payment made on time. And in the space where the owner’s name should be, nothing at all.
She digs, and finds three more. Four addresses, four names gone from every written record in the village, and from every person who might have missed them.
The office cat, who is not remotely an ordinary cat, can tell Eleanor exactly what became of the last investigator who started asking — and what is likely to become of her, if she carries on.
Somebody in Brackenmere has spent a very long time keeping the disappearances quiet, and has never yet failed.
Eleanor is getting closer. The question is whether she can find out what happened to the missing, without becoming one of them.
For readers who like their heroines competent, their villages English, and their villains pouring the tea.
Buy THE HOLLOW FILE and begin the Curses & Claims mysteries today.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
For twenty years Eleanor Finch took fraudulent insurance claims apart for a living. The same day she was made redundant, a letter appeared in her bag: postmarked, addressed to her, never delivered. It offered work in a Suffolk village she could find almost nothing about.
Brackenmere is postcard-pretty, with stone cottages and lanes that have opinions about where you are going. The insurance office runs on paper, rotary telephones and a pen that writes by itself. The claims defy every principle Eleanor has ever worked by.
Then she finds the folder the last investigator hid before she vanished. A cottage on Willow End, empty for eight years. Every payment made on time. And in the space where the owner’s name should be, nothing at all.
She digs, and finds three more. Four addresses, four names gone from every written record in the village, and from every person who might have missed them.
The office cat, who is not remotely an ordinary cat, can tell Eleanor exactly what became of the last investigator who started asking — and what is likely to become of her, if she carries on.
Somebody in Brackenmere has spent a very long time keeping the disappearances quiet, and has never yet failed.
Eleanor is getting closer. The question is whether she can find out what happened to the missing, without becoming one of them.
For readers who like their heroines competent, their villages English, and their villains pouring the tea.
Buy THE HOLLOW FILE and begin the Curses & Claims mysteries today.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Leena Maria's The Hollow File