Hollow Ground

Some buildings don't want to be read.

Eleven months after his wife's death, retired architect Phil Calder arrives in the Cumbrian village of Kirkby Ravensgill carrying a leather notebook he has not yet opened. Rachel had booked the cottage. Rachel had been studying a stonework motif that ran from a fell-side church to a farmhouse outside Périgueux to a monastery in Porto. Rachel had not lived to walk the route.

Phil intends to stay a season. He intends to read.

What he finds is a village with long memory and older silences. A postmistress who knew he was coming. A dry-stone waller who knows every boundary line in the parish and very little of what he has chosen to forget. A church restorer dead from a fall the police are content to call an accident. A pattern in the stonework above the tower door that someone, in 1952, took considerable trouble to seal in.

Phil has spent thirty years reading buildings as arguments. He understands that walls do not leave things out.
Hollow Ground is the first book in The Kirkby Ravensgill Mysteries - a literary cozy in the tradition of Tana French's The Searcher and Richard Osman's We Solve Murders, where the architecture is the breadcrumbs and grief is a structure that holds.