The Rural Vet's Double Life
An 1890s Romantic Suspense

About this book:

Dr. Chloe Brooks expects dust and boredom cataloging a Victorian veterinary ledger in a drafty attic. Instead, she finds a cipher written in poison margins—arsenic, strychnine, and a woman's desperate plea hidden between treatments for colic and milk fever. In 1892, Dr. John Sterling rides the Pennsylvania hills as the county's trusted horse doctor, but his true patients are human, his real medicine is antidote, and his ledger is a death warrant if the master of Blackwood Manor ever deciphers it.

One hundred thirty years apart, two investigators circle the same conspiracy. Chloe decodes Sterling's cryptic symbols while a modern stalker watches the historical society's windows. In the nineteenth century, Sterling doses a tyrant's tea with iron oxide by night and tends plow horses by day, racing to spirit a poisoned wife to safety before the "bitter draught" claims her. The rain-slicked roads, the locked stable loft, the glued-shut pages—every clue Chloe uncovers pulls her deeper into a Victorian labyrinth where the line between healer and executioner was drawn in invisible ink.

Atmospheric and tightly plotted, *The Rural Vet's Double Life* weaves gothic suspense with historical precision, delivering a dual-timeline mystery where a ledger's hidden margins hold the only truth that matters: some poisons are measured in drops, others in decades, and the antidote requires breaking every rule in the book.