Shadows in the Provincial Courthouse
A Noir Tale of Two Timelines

About this book:

In the dripping sub-basement of Blackwood County's courthouse, clerk Clara Vance uncovers a file that shouldn't exist: a 1954 homicide docket sealed with black wax, buried beneath routine misdemeanors. The victim was Arthur Finch—town patriarch, officially dead of a heart attack fifty miles away. The defense attorney was Thaddeus Vance, now the county's iron-fisted presiding judge. The bailiff who guarded the trial was Marcus Vance, now the building's watchful chief of security. And the crime scene? An office in this very basement, bricked over and erased from the blueprints.

Seventy years later, the past isn't just leaking through the floorboards—it's watching from the parking lot. When Clara reopens Case 408-B in the grand index, she triggers a cold war waged in smoke-filled chambers and midnight subpoenas. The judge controls the record. The bailiff controls the halls. And someone has been waiting decades for the file to resurface.

*Shadows in the Provincial Courthouse* is a dual-timeline noir where every gavel fall echoes with a lie, every sealed docket hides a body, and the only witness left is a clerk who refuses to file it away.