The Bells of Hollinmere

The chapel bell had been silent seventeen years. It rang on her first night.

Spring 1848. Isolde Wray, four years a widow and a counter of everything, comes to Hollinmere to study the bell that has hung silent since the chapel was closed in 1831. At four in the morning on her first night, she hears it strike.

Osric Fell arrives days later on a private commission, tracing a smuggling route inland from Grimscar Cove. He does not believe in bells that ring themselves. Isolde does not believe in men who keep their notebooks closed. They work warily, then together: a chapel door barred from inside, a padlock whose keyhole seems to face the wrong way, a false wall in the crypt, and a ledger page under a loose stone that credits a share to two initials.

The estate's solicitor is selling the chapel wing, and the vicar's letters asking to inspect it have gone unanswered. Somewhere near the bell is the reason why. Isolde means to count her way to it before the sale is signed.

A standalone historical mystery without a murder, set on the Yorkshire moors, with clues laid fairly on the page and a clean, slow-burn romance.

The Hollinmere Inheritance: five historical mysteries at one moorland house, 1807 to 1864. Each may be read alone; together they tell the story of the house.