The Gilded Shroud: A Death Designed to Look Like an Accident

A seventy-four-year-old man goes over an eight-foot terrace wall in Pasadena on the fourth of March. The gardener finds him at twenty past seven. She waits thirty-two minutes before she calls anyone.That gap is the only thing wrong with the case, and it is the reason Eleanor Vance walks up two flights of stairs to a one-man office on Colorado Boulevard and hires Stan Kowski to look at her uncle's death.Stan is sixty-three. He has eleven days before probate closes, a client who is also a beneficiary, and an estate full of people who are all, without exception, being helpful. The lawyer answers every question. The butler keeps a day book. The executor makes the coffee herself and tells him things nobody asked her for.Every answer he gets costs him something. A boundary he mentions in passing becomes a lawsuit against the estate paying his invoice. A photograph he takes becomes a licensing complaint he cannot answer. A file he trades away puts an innocent woman in a cell.And somewhere in a house where everyone is telling the truth, one person is telling it beautifully.A slow-burn mystery about money, gardens, and what it costs an honest man to keep asking.