The Sanday Inheritance
(2026)(The ninth book in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mystery series)
A novel by Phillip Strang
An old woman dies in her bed. Twelve days later, her carer is dead on the kitchen floor.
When retired GP Helen Wishart dies quietly on the remote Orkney island of Sanday, there is nothing to investigate. She was old; her heart had been failing for years. But twelve days later, her live-in carer, Rachel Buchan, is found dead on the same kitchen floor — struck once, with a heavy ceramic bowl that someone took the trouble to wipe clean and set back on the dresser.
Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch comes over from Stromness on the morning flight. What she finds is an estate worth more than a million pounds, two nieces from a Glasgow family kept at arm's length for thirty years, a will quietly redrawn three weeks before Helen died, and an island where everyone knows something and no one says it unless you ask in exactly the right way.
The case has a clean shape: who gained by the will. Freya works it across thirteen days — a married farmer and the woman he was seeing, a wife who knew, an ex-wife alone in a cottage at the end of a lane, a contingency clause naming a beneficiary no one expected. Every line of inquiry holds together. Every line is wrong.
Because the question that mattered was never who gained. It was what an old woman with a failing heart had been frightened of, on behalf of the girl who looked after her. And the answer to that had been sitting in a quiet Sanday kitchen the whole time, in the keeping of a woman who would have told the first person who came and asked her plainly, with nothing official in their hand.
A slow-burning, atmospheric Scottish island mystery for readers who want their detective fiction quiet, human, and exact. Book 9 in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mysteries — a complete story that can be read on its own.
Genre: Mystery
When retired GP Helen Wishart dies quietly on the remote Orkney island of Sanday, there is nothing to investigate. She was old; her heart had been failing for years. But twelve days later, her live-in carer, Rachel Buchan, is found dead on the same kitchen floor — struck once, with a heavy ceramic bowl that someone took the trouble to wipe clean and set back on the dresser.
Detective Inspector Freya Tulloch comes over from Stromness on the morning flight. What she finds is an estate worth more than a million pounds, two nieces from a Glasgow family kept at arm's length for thirty years, a will quietly redrawn three weeks before Helen died, and an island where everyone knows something and no one says it unless you ask in exactly the right way.
The case has a clean shape: who gained by the will. Freya works it across thirteen days — a married farmer and the woman he was seeing, a wife who knew, an ex-wife alone in a cottage at the end of a lane, a contingency clause naming a beneficiary no one expected. Every line of inquiry holds together. Every line is wrong.
Because the question that mattered was never who gained. It was what an old woman with a failing heart had been frightened of, on behalf of the girl who looked after her. And the answer to that had been sitting in a quiet Sanday kitchen the whole time, in the keeping of a woman who would have told the first person who came and asked her plainly, with nothing official in their hand.
A slow-burning, atmospheric Scottish island mystery for readers who want their detective fiction quiet, human, and exact. Book 9 in the Freya Tulloch Orkney Mysteries — a complete story that can be read on its own.
Genre: Mystery