Author

Ash Corvax

4 books · 484,145 words on the shelf · every title opens with a free ⌈20%⌉ sample

Bibliography

The Coldfield Ledger

A soft floorboard in an old church hides a tin box , and the truth it contains refuses to stay buried. When Reverend Josiah Wren pried up the board beneath the harmonium, he expected rot, not revelation: a rusted tin containing a century-old ledger, a stack of letters, a confession, and a diary whose final entry names names the village has spent generations forgetting. Each page pulls him deeper into the histories of Coldfield Parish , the Marsh family, the Vellums, Mathilda Vance's half-whispered accusations, and a quiet pact of silence that has outlasted every grave in the churchyard. As Josiah presses, the parish tightens: Edmund Hale deflects, Cora Fenwick grieves, Harriet Vellum remembers more than she admits, and Luther Cavendish watches from the edges of every conversation. Dr. Linus Ardmore and Deputy Arthur Fenwick begin to see what Josiah sees. A Boston Globe reporter has begun asking questions. The County District Attorney is waiting. The ledger has already named the guilty. The only question left is whether Coldfield will speak the names aloud , or bury them again, and let Josiah carry them alone.

20 chapters · 122,827 words · 9h 18m read

Start reading free

Mystery

The Marble Court

Three nights of river flooding have soaked the Royal Society's lower archives, and when investigator Severin Vale descends into the reeking vault beneath Wren's Bridge, he finds the waters have left behind more than silt-swamped ledgers. A body lies among the ruined marble specimens, positioned with the deliberate stillness of a staged accusation. With only the sodden archives and the testimony of a carved gargoyle for company, Vale calls upon Una Mallory and Constable Phineas Crow to help untangle what the flood tried to wash clean. Their inquiry draws them upward through London's stratified world of learned societies, private collectors, and old money, a place where Lord Erasmus Hale presides over his marble court and reputations are carved as carefully as the statuary beneath the city. Each suspect offers a polished alibi: Hester Lynd, whose quiet grief masks a sharper memory; Tobias Mallory, whose curiosity has always outpaced his caution; Cressida Vane, whose influence over the Society's quieter patrons is as refined as it is ruthless; Aldous Penner, whose marble trade thrives on secrets others cannot afford to keep; Olliver Drum, whose loyalty to his patrons borders on the fanatical; Maren Ashby, whose family name once adorned the Society's halls; and Josiah Creed, the archivist who insists nothing of value was lost. With every interview, Vale peels back another polished surface and uncovers another lie calcified into stone. The deeper he digs, the more certain he becomes that the killer is not hiding from the truth, but protecting it. To expose the murderer, Vale must decide whether some histories are worth preserving, or whether the only justice left is to drag them, at last, into the light.

20 chapters · 123,147 words · 9h 20m read

Start reading free

Mystery

The Salt and the Silence

Maren Hale has spent four years forgetting Coldrust Bay , the taste of salt, the scream of gulls, and the night she left without saying goodbye. But when a rain-lashed coach delivers her back to the harbour she fled, she finds a body waiting in the boathouse, and a silence waiting inside her. Constable Bram Tregear wants the case closed before the tide turns; the village wants the stranger gone. Between them stands Maren, drawn into an investigation that threads through the nets of Fisherman Eddle Ott, the ledgers of Innkeeper Yara Mott, the sermons of Father Bramwell, and the ledgers of a London shipping clerk who should never have come north. As Maren presses forward, she crosses paths with the enigmatic Aldous Venn, the watchful Mistresses Petal and Crowe, the gravedigger Senn with his long memory, and a hooded figure seen on the cliffs above the bay. Captain Roderick Quill's ship sits heavy in the harbour, Pell Drury trades whispers for coin, and a London special investigator arrives bearing questions of his own. Each revelation tightens the noose around a conspiracy that reaches from the boathouse floor to the principal Josiah Crewe. Maren can walk away again , or she can stay, drag the truth into the light, and risk becoming the next thing the bay swallows. The salt remembers everything. Now it is her turn to speak.

20 chapters · 120,179 words · 9h 6m read

Start reading free

Mystery

The Frost Key

When a Swedish cartographer is found dead in his St. Petersburg study, a final letter arrives at the desk of translator Maren Halvorsen, naming her as the only person who can finish what he started. The letter speaks of a relic called the Frost Key, tied to a dynasty of five brothers and buried beneath decades of forged identities, false deaths, and one missing lighthouse keeper's wife. As Maren traces the trail from the imperial archives of Trondheim to the frozen coastline of northern Norway, every clue she uncovers draws dangerous eyes her way. Armed men led by the relentless Captain Evald Mork pursue her across snowbound harbors and hidden coves, while a deaf Finnish knife-grinder, a Sami boy, and a wary priest become her unlikely allies. Imposters wear the faces of trusted contacts. Letters from the dead arrive without postage. The closer Maren comes to the truth, the more she realizes the cartographer's murder was not an ending, but a door, and the Frost Key may already be in the wrong hands. What she does with her next clue will determine whether a buried legacy resurfaces, or stays entombed in ice.

20 chapters · 117,992 words · 8h 56m read

Start reading free