The Wrong Grave: A Cecily Marchmont Mystery

Suffolk, February 1935. Wraymere Hall stands beyond a causeway that the tide covers twice a day - and for a few hours at a stretch, nobody can reach it and nobody can leave.Colonel Edmund Ashburne is dying. A young man has come from Canada claiming to be the grandson nobody knew existed, and if he can prove it, the estate is his. The family solicitor hires Cecily Marchmont, a London genealogist who has spent eleven years proving who people really are, to take the claim apart.She does not find what she was sent for. In the parish register of 1904 she finds a burial that does not add up: a grave dug at night, paid for by the Hall, in the pauper corner of the churchyard, with a stranger's name cut into the stone above it.Two days later the solicitor is dead in his bed, and the water is over the road.Everyone in the house had the opportunity. Nobody had a motive worth killing for. And the only person who knows what happened in November 1904 has kept the secret for thirty-one years - and is about to decide, at last, to tell the truth.The Wrong Grave is a Golden Age mystery in the classic English tradition: a closed circle, a cold house, a village with a long memory, and a detective armed with nothing but other people's paperwork. Every clue is on the page before the solution. The answer has been sitting in plain sight since chapter one. The first Cecily Marchmont mystery.