The Last Carve at Kingston House

By Lucian Haverly

When a private detective is invited to a family Thanksgiving, he expects an uncomfortable dinner. He doesn't expect a corpse—or to fall for the man everyone suspects committed the murder.

Eliot Harper arrives at Kingston House as a favor to an old university friend. Nate Kingston asked for an ally, and Eliot—a private detective more comfortable cataloguing other people's pasts than risking his own future—understood the unspoken plea beneath the invitation. What he finds is a gilded cage: a crumbling dynasty presided over by a patriarch who wields money like a blade and affection like a ransom.

Then Henry Kingston raises his glass, delivers a toast dripping with menace, and dies.

The wine glass shatters. The family fractures. And Detective Sanders arrives with all the blunt authority of a man who has already decided which grieving son looks most convenient. As the house becomes a crime scene and suspicion poisons every glance across the dinner table, Eliot finds himself drawn to Nate with an intensity that has no place in a murder investigation—and every place in his chest.

The poison came from the estate's forgotten conservatory. The motive runs through decades of financial cruelty, shattered ambitions, and a patriarch who controlled his children the way other men controlled livestock. Every suspect had reason. Every alibi has edges. And each secret Eliot uncovers pulls him closer to Nate—and deeper into the crosshairs of a killer who has already proven they will sacrifice anyone to survive.

Eliot was trained to read evidence, not people. But Nate Kingston has cracked something open in him that no locked library and no stolen letter can explain. Choosing truth means destroying someone. Choosing Nate means risking everything he has left to lose.

A forced-proximity, slow-burn historical MM mystery romance set in 1950s New England, featuring secrets behind locked doors and two men choosing each other against all evidence.