The Bell-Wire Girl
A Novel of Secrets and Service

About this book:

In the walls of Blackwood Hall, copper wires hum with the house's secrets—and Cora Finch is the only one who knows how to listen. As the estate's young bell-hanger, she moves unseen through crawlspaces and voids, maintaining the nervous system that summons servants with a pull of brass. But when the wire to the Master's Study is cleanly severed and its slack concealed at the annunciator board, Cora realizes the silence isn't a fault. It's a trap. With Lord Julian closeted over disputed coal leases and his secretary prowling the basement, the house's hidden passages become a hunt ground where the next summons may never be answered.

Atmospheric and tightly wound, *The Bell-Wire Girl* transforms the great house novel into a clockwork thriller. From the grease-stained fingers of a heroine who belongs neither upstairs nor down, to the ticking annunciator board that records every call—and every call that fails to come—this is historical mystery at its most inventive. For readers who love the claustrophobic elegance of *The Turn of the Screw* and the mechanical ingenuity of *The Clockwork Dynasty*, a new voice in Victorian suspense has found the perfect frequency.