The Midnight Ledger

The invitation was signed by Arthur Sterling. Arthur Sterling did not write it.Elena Vance has read other people’s handwriting for a living for eleven years. The card that brings her out to Blackwood House is a forgery so good it isn’t a forgery at all - no stalls, no retouching, none of the little hesitations where a copyist stops to check himself against the model. Whoever wrote that card has written like that for a long time.She goes anyway. Her reasons are eleven years old and one of them is a photograph of a door.Three hours into the gala, Arthur Sterling - collector, philanthropist, seventy-four - goes up to his study, shoots the bolt on the inside, and dies.One door. One window painted shut. A bolt that has to be cut out of the frame with a chisel before anyone can reach him.Then the wind backs into the northeast, the boat doesn’t sail, and nobody leaves the island until Tuesday.What Elena has to work with: a house full of people who cannot go anywhere, a policeman nobody sent, working a case that was never assigned to him, and one telephone on a wall in the estate office.She is not a detective. She is a loss adjuster - somebody who has spent her whole working life proving that what looks impossible is usually just badly written down. Blackwood House writes everything down. That turns out to be the problem.And the further in she gets, the worse the shape of it becomes. A second ledger in Sterling’s hand with fifteen years of names in it. A fire in 2004 that killed a fourteen-year-old boy. A closing report signed by a field adjuster of twenty-seven who did not lie, and who has never once been able to say she told the whole truth.Somebody in that house killed Arthur Sterling.Somebody in that house has been helping her since the first morning.They are the same person.THE MIDNIGHT LEDGER is a closed-circle murder mystery in the classic tradition - a locked room, an island cut off by weather, a finite list of suspects, and a solution that plays fair to the last comma. Every clue is on the page. Every one of them is in the file before the end, in somebody’s handwriting, with the time written against it.You will not catch it. But you will be able to go back and find the exact page where you should have.For readers of Anthony Horowitz, Stuart Turton, and Ann Cleeves.