The Cipher at Winterbourne

When her father dies under suspicious circumstances, Miss Lenora Wycliffe inherits more than his books, papers, and modest Devonshire home. She inherits a warning.Trust no one at Winterbourne.Brilliant, petite, and far too often underestimated, Lenora has spent her life surrounded by languages, ledgers, and old secrets. But the cipher her father leaves behind points to something far more dangerous than scholarship: a Cornish estate hiding a decades-old crime, a falsified shipwreck, missing French gold, and a woman known only as the Rose.Then Captain Nathaniel Harrow appears in her father's house.Tall, dark, and shadowed by scandal, Harrow is a disgraced naval officer with secrets of his own. Society believes him a coward. The Admiralty knows better. Lenora has every reason to distrust him-especially when her father's final message warns her to find the Rose before Harrow does.But Winterbourne House is not a place one survives alone.As Lenora travels from Devon to the storm-lashed Cornish coast, she finds herself drawn into a mystery of forged records, hidden caves, old betrayals, and powerful families determined to keep the past buried. With the help of her sharp-eyed companion Bea, a stubborn basset-type hound named Fig, and the dangerous man she is not sure she can trust, Lenora must uncover what her father discovered before the same secrets claim her life.

Pages: 469, Paperback, Independently published