The Island's Only Road
A Medieval Mystery and Its Long Shadow

About this book:

On the island of Oakhaven, there is only one road—a narrow spine of frost-rimed cobbles stitching the eastern docks to the western cliffs. When a stranger in a fine blue cloak is found dead in a ditch beside it, his skull stove in and a cryptic wax seal hidden in his boot, the island's peace shatters. No boat has crossed the strait in days. The man didn't stay at the inn. He simply appeared on the only path anyone can take, only to die on it.

Constable Aldous has spent twenty-two years settling pig disputes and dragging drunks from gutters. He has never hunted a killer. But on an island this small, with a single artery running through its heart, the murderer cannot have vanished—they're still walking the same road as everyone else. As Aldous pries into the dead man's identity, the villagers close ranks. Each chapter pulls back another layer of Oakhaven's quiet complicity: the blacksmith's secret, the priest's confession, the miller's tale, the poisoned well, the long silence that has protected generations.

Atmospheric and tightly plotted, *The Island's Only Road* is a medieval mystery where the setting is a character and the past is never buried deep enough. For readers who love the claustrophobic tension of *The Name of the Rose* and the rural grit of *The Reeve's Tale*, this is a story about what happens when a community's only way out becomes the very thing that traps them.