A Tessa Calloway Mystery
The Ashcombe Bequest
The will is a trap. The island is a witness. Seven guests, three nights, one heir — and a storm closing the only way out.
Every house keeps its secrets. Windward House keeps a record.
The will is a trap. The island is a witness. Seven guests, three nights, one heir — and a storm closing the only way out.
Every house keeps its secrets. Windward House keeps a record.
Edmund Ashcombe is six weeks dead, and his family has been summoned to Perdita Cay — the private island his money built — to hear what he left behind.
Book conservator Tessa Calloway came to hold her oldest friend's hand through the reading. She stays because the will is not a will at all: it is a mechanism, wound and waiting. The entire estate to the one person nobody expected. Everyone confined to the island for three nights, on pain of forfeiture. And a lawyer with a second envelope he refuses, absolutely, to open.
Then the storm arrives ahead of schedule, the boats stop coming — and the dying starts.
Tessa restores damaged books for a living. She knows that paper keeps a record of everything done to it. So, she discovers, does a house.
“The boat had no name, which struck Tessa Calloway as a small act of arrogance.”— the opening line
Seven guests under one roof, and a housekeeper who keeps more than the house. By the morning of the fourth day, one of them will be a murderer twice over.
Book conservator. Reads houses the way she reads damaged bindings.
Tessa's oldest friend — and the reason she came.
Housekeeper, thirty-one years. Sees everything. Says less.
The granddaughter from Canada. The only one everybody likes.
The eldest son. Owed more than money, and knows it.
Edmund's second wife. Ten years into an iron contract.
Business partner since the first boat. Sweats honestly.
The lawyer. Keeps the secrets — and keeps them sealed.
“This house is old. It makes noises. Sleep through them.”— Etta Baptiste, the first night
Perdita — the paper name, the chart name. The lost one. Nothing on this island was ever lost.
A white house on a grey cliff, a hundred stone steps to a nameless boat, and a hurricane named Odette turning the only exit into open water. When the generator fails, Windward House goes back forty years in a single evening:
