The Aletheia

A Mediterranean gothic of money, marriage, and what a woman owes the truth when the truth was built to destroy her.

Conrad Vael - shipping magnate, fourth-generation heir to one of Europe's oldest fortunes - has died at seventy-four, in his bed, on his own superyacht, with a book on his chest and a single white pill on the floor beside the slipper of his fourth wife.

They are calling it a heart attack.

Forensic accountant Nora Vance has been flown to Mallorca to value the estate. What she finds in the books is not what she was hired to find. There is a Tuesday transfer to a Liechtenstein account that does not appear on any contract. There is a bleed of twenty-one million euros through a Panamanian shell. There is a yacht being kept, in another sea, for reasons no one has been willing to put on a page.

And there is Isobel - the widow. Half her late husband's age. The only member of the family not contesting the will. Beautiful, exact, and waiting for Nora at the end of a wooden dock at the edge of a cove called the Bay of the Dead.

As the household closes around her - five contesting heirs, a housekeeper who knows everything, a server room kept locked since the morning of the death, and a missing dinghy nobody will name - Nora is drawn into a slow-burning intimacy with the one person she cannot afford to trust. Is Isobel confiding in her, or seducing her away from the truth? When the bronze horse on Conrad's desk is moved in the night, Nora begins to understand that someone in the house has been erasing him from existence while the body was still warm.

And that the same someone has now decided what to do about her.