The Lock-Keeper's Ward at Dusk
A Gothic Mystery

About this book:

On the stagnant reaches of the Shropshire Union Canal, the water keeps its secrets—until the lock gates cough up a woman in black silk, her fingers torn raw from scratching at brickwork in the dark. Fourteen-year-old Effie, mute since childhood and ward to the irascible lock-keeper Jonas, knows every rhythm of the cut: the cough of a barge engine three miles off, the slip of a horse's shoe in clay, the particular suck of water rising when it ought to fall. But nothing has prepared her for the pale arm hooked from the sluice pit, the delicate chain wrapped tight as a noose around the drowned woman's waist, or the cold silver oval she palms from the corpse's collar before the bargemen round the bend.

With Higgins's oil boat chugging toward them and the fog rising like a held breath, Jonas insists on silence and a tarp. But Effie has seen the neat oval of the dead woman's fingernails, the fine lace at her cuffs, the terror frozen on a face that belongs to the manor house beyond the reeds—not the canal. As the autumn mist swallows Lock Number Nine, a mute girl and a stubborn old man become the only witnesses to a murder the water was meant to erase. And somewhere in the big house on the hill, someone is watching the towpath, waiting to see what the night drags ashore.

Atmospheric, claustrophobic, and steeped in the mud and machinery of a vanishing world, *The Lock-Keeper's Ward at Dusk* is a Gothic mystery where the past never stays submerged. From the rusted gears of the lock to the rotten heart of the manor, every chapter turns the screw tighter—because in a place where sound travels on water and a girl without a voice sees everything, the truth has a way of floating to the surface.