The Forgotten Frame
A reluctant antiquarian inherits a decaying estate shrouded in fog, and a locked room hiding a secret someone will kill to keep buried. When Bartholomew Wren arrives at the crumbling Vespermoor estate to catalogue its neglected archives, he expects only dust, damp, and the tedium of a dying house. Instead, he walks into a household balanced on the edge of collapse. Mrs. Calloway rules Vespermoor with a steely grip, her children Edwin and Cordelia simmering with old resentments, while the staff, led by the sharp-eyed Margery Thorne and the quietly observant Hesper Quill, exchange whispered warnings in shadowed corridors. When a single photograph vanishes from an ornate frame sealed shut for decades, the house begins to give up its dead. Hushed scandals resurface, alibis unravel, and a body of evidence emerges that implicates more than one resident. Bartholomew, aided by the reluctant Alistair Fenwick and the cryptic insights of Dr. Cornelius Vane, must piece together the photograph's story before the photograph's owner meets the same fate, or before the household's darkest truth is silenced forever. Every locked door at Vespermoor hides a choice: reveal what was forgotten, or become part of the secret it keeps.