The Weir Mark: An Ice Age Mystery

The thaw has broken the river open. And a guest who came to speak the truth is dead in the shallows.Spring has come to the Urren valley, and the Kettle's weir - the great bone-and-wattle crescent that feeds forty people through the year - is being strung for the fish run. Into this fragile season comes Ile, a quiet woman nobody recognises, and an envoy from the Far Fires, the downriver settlement pressing an old claim over the weir and its water.Then Ile is found strangled at Green Shore, hidden in the roots of a dead alder, with the mark of a three-strand cord pressed into her throat.The cord belongs to the weir. And only one man handles the weir-cord.Ruva the finder must untangle two mysteries at once: who Ile really was, and why someone silenced her before a joint tribunal could hear what she came to say. But when the clues point toward a man Ruva trusts - a man she loves - the finder's sharpest tool becomes her blindest spot.With the Far Fires watching and two settlements on the edge of a rift that goes back a hundred years, Ruva must choose between the truth and the story she wants to be true - before the tribunal names the wrong hand and breaks a peace that took a generation to build. The Weir Mark is the second book in The River Kettle, a prehistoric cozy mystery series set 30,000 years before the first written word - where a guest's murder exposes a lie the community has been telling itself since its founding, and the finder learns that the hardest case is the one where you already know the answer and don't want it to be right.Perfect for readers who love: - A whodunit complicated by the detective's own heart- Two communities colliding over an ancient grievance- Forensic clues drawn from rope-work, river craft, and carved bone tallies- A slow-burn romance tested to breaking point- Rich world-building rooted in authentic Ice Age river lifeFor fans of Louise Penny's long-buried village secrets, Jean Auel's prehistoric world-building, and Tana French's investigators who get too close - if you love a closed community, a detective undone by trust, and a landscape that keeps its own accounts.Book Two of The River Kettle. No cliffhanger. Complete mystery.