What the Henges Hold: Book One of Hengeward Cycle

The Thornborough Henges are not monuments. They are prisons. Meredith Harding has just inherited the keys. Nineteen years after fleeing Yorkshire, museum curator Meredith Harding has built a safe life among carefully catalogued dead things. Then a Saxon sword screams beneath her hands, and news arrives that Catherine Harding, her brilliant and impossible mother, is dead. Back at Thornborough, the farmhouse kitchen is warm, the villagers know when to stop talking, and three ancient henges wait in the rain like something patient pretending to be earth. Catherine spent forty years keeping what lies beneath them sealed. Now the duty has passed to Mer. But her mother's death was murder, and someone within the secret Keeper network wants the prison opened. To expose the traitor, Mer must trust a young Keeper who believes she abandoned them, a soldier bound to her family, a housekeeper whose kindness is older than it should be, and an enormous cat with little respect for the laws of nature. Every use of power costs blood. Every failure costs memory. And the closer Mer comes to the truth, the more the prison beneath Thornborough begins to recognise her. Blending dark contemporary fantasy, Yorkshire folk horror, cosmic dread and supernatural murder mystery, What the Henges Hold is the first book in The Hengeward Cycle. Some prisons should never be opened.