The Plague Village Letters

Thornwell keeps its dead close.

The plague quarantine boundary still marks the north road. The old lead mine still sits half-collapsed above the village, roped off and mostly ignored. And once a year, the whole village turns out to commemorate the morning in 1665 when Thornwell sealed itself off to save itself — a story everyone knows, and no one has ever questioned.

Until a cream envelope arrives on a doorstep with no name and no stamp, addressed to a woman whose family has lived here for three hundred years, asking what exactly her ancestor sealed inside that mine.

Maren Shipley, the village's newest resident and its only genealogist, has spent six months trying to explain why her own family disappeared from the Thornwell records in that same plague year. Now she has a second mystery to chase, and a village that would very much prefer she didn't.

The deeper Maren and her reluctant ally Diane dig, the less Thornwell's history looks like the version carved on the memorial. And the more it looks like someone is prepared to kill to keep it that way.