The Bal Maiden's Ledger
A 1620s Cornish Mining Mystery

About this book:

In the tin-mining valleys of 1624 Cornwall, the earth speaks in vibrations—and Loveday Trenerry listens with her bones. Deaf since birth, the young bal maiden reads the hidden truths of Wheal Grace in the shudder of waterwheels, the density of stone beneath her thumb, and the tells on men's faces. When the Stannary Court's bailiff turns up dead in a wooden launder, a sealed ledger clutched at his side, Loveday witnesses the mine captain and a royal deputy-warden drag the body into an abandoned adit rather than summon the law. She alone knows the dead man carried proof of smuggled ore and a map marking "The King's Adit" in fresh ink. She alone saw the miner's boot-print at the shaft mouth. And with no voice to accuse the powerful, she must turn the mine's own secrets against them.

Kathleen Jennings crafts a mystery as layered as the granite seams her heroine sorts: a locked-room death in an open landscape, a conspiracy rooted in the Stannary's ancient privileges, and a protagonist whose silence is her sharpest weapon. Here, the clang of stamps and the suck of slimes form a soundscape felt rather than heard; the politics of tin—King's tax, adventurers' greed, tinners' oaths—play out in lamplit counting houses and lightless drifts. Loveday's pursuit of justice pulls her from the dressing floor to the Coinage Town, from the blowing-house flame to the Stannary Court itself, each step shadowed by men who would bury the truth as deep as the yellow mundic in the flooded levels.

Atmospheric, meticulously researched, and driven by a heroine as resilient as the cassiterite she hunts, *The Bal Maiden's Ledger* announces a striking new voice in historical crime fiction. For readers who crave the mud-and-grit realism of *The Miniaturist* meets the institutional intrigue of *The Name of the Rose*—all anchored in a Cornwall where the rock remembers every hand that struck it.