A Crown in the Pudding

By Lucian Haverly

A murderer moves freely through a snowbound English country house. The only men who can stop him are hiding a secret that could destroy them both.

Edmund Vale catalogs rare books for a living—a profession built on the patient art of noticing what others overlook. When a Christmas invitation brings him to Winterset Hall, he arrives prepared for faded grandeur and family tension. He is not prepared for the weight of resentment radiating from every gilded frame and frost-edged window, nor for the particular warmth of Harry Pike standing beside him on the drive, their shoulders carefully, deliberately apart.

Harry is a village constable—the wrong class for the house, the wrong rank for the dining table, the wrong everything by Lady Beatrice Lethbridge's exacting standards. He comes anyway, because Edmund is there, and because Harry has learned that some things are worth the discomfort of not quite belonging. When Sir Oswald Lethbridge collapses over his Christmas pudding, blue-faced and gasping, Harry's professional instincts ignite. Someone in this house just committed murder.

The method is diabolically precise: a wax capsule, a family tradition weaponized, cyanide delivered by candlelight and flaming brandy. As Edmund and Harry peel back thirty years of buried scandal—an illegitimate son, falsified documents, a solicitor with ruinous secrets—the suspects multiply and the killer grows desperate. Then comes the threat that changes everything: cooperate with a cover-up, or watch their own secret dragged into the light.

They have spent years perfecting the architecture of discretion—a careful distance in public, warmth rationed to locked rooms and stolen minutes. But a killer who knows their vulnerability is a killer with leverage. And the only way to catch him is to stop hiding long enough to fight.

A forced-proximity historical MM romance featuring amateur sleuths, dangerous secrets, and the cost of choosing truth.