Six hundred deaths
in forty years.
Only one did not add up.

Nobody ever suggested adding a daughter, and Edith Vane never asked. For four decades she has kept the chapel of rest in her quiet English village, kept her buckram ledgers, and kept her father's rule: put down what you see, put down who said it, and leave the rest to those who are paid for it.

But when seventy-four-year-old Harold Phipps is brought in from Priory Farm, signed off by the doctor as natural causes, Edith notices a narrow band of abraded skin on each wrist. For the first time in forty years, she breaks her own rule. She takes her pencil and makes a mark in the margin. A small asterisk. Three strokes.

In a village of four hundred people, a question is a dangerous thing to ask.

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