Author

Sloane Marrow

4 books · 471,747 words on the shelf · every title opens with a free ⌈20%⌉ sample

Bibliography

The Mason's Debt

When Eliza Quinn steps off a rain-soaked carriage and onto the cracked cobbles of Hollowmere, she intends only to settle her late father's affairs and return to the life she left behind. But the moorland village has not welcomed an outsider in decades, and its residents, led by the formidable Margaret Thatcher and the reluctant Cordelia Ashworth, watch her arrival with the guarded suspicion of people guarding old graves. Among them, Hugo Pemberton, Harriet Vale, Alistair Wren, Edwin Graves, and the rest of Hollowmere's dwindling inhabitants all share one truth: they remember Eliza's father, and they remember what he built. Years ago, the village mason crafted a clock unlike any other, a piece he called the Bone Clock, and the debts incurred in its making were never fully settled. When a body is discovered in the abandoned workshop, Eliza inherits more than her father's estate. She inherits a ledger of secrets, a village of suspects, and a choice that will determine whether Hollowmere's silence endures or its buried debts finally come due. Each chapter draws her deeper into alliances she cannot trust and grudges she does not yet understand, and with every fragment of the past she uncovers, the noose tightens around whoever knows the truth about the night the mason's clock stopped ticking.

20 chapters · 117,361 words · 8h 53m read

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Mystery

The Rust Bell

When conservator Dr. Elena Vasquez arrives at the fog-shrouded Cliffside Maritime Museum to restore an eighteenth-century diving bell, she finds a dead man sealed inside it. Sheriff Dalton Briggs calls it a diving accident and wants the case closed before the next tide rolls in, but Elena's trained eye catches what the locals want her to miss: tool marks on the bell's rim where none should exist, and a corroded inscription tying the relic to a colonial sailor who disappeared two centuries before the victim ever drew breath. As she digs deeper, Elena draws the attention of Arthur Pendergast, the museum's elderly curator whose late wife, Hattie Lou, left behind a coded journal no one has been able to read. The local trawler captain refuses to discuss what his nets dragged up, the tollkeeper on the cliff road has been watching strangers for weeks, and Father Lemuel Coates at the shore chapel knows more about the colonial wreck than his vows allow him to tell. Even Marguerite Hallor, the journalist who came up from the city to write a human-interest piece, is asking questions that cut too close. With help from her skeptical brother, Marco Vasquez, and the stubborn archivist Jessamine Cole, Elena begins to suspect the bell was never lost at all, it was hidden. Someone in Cliffside has been waiting a very long time for it to surface, and they are not finished with the bodies. The tide is coming in. The bell has something to say, and whether Elena lives long enough to hear it will depend on how deep she is willing to dive.

20 chapters · 121,480 words · 9h 12m read

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Mystery

The Marrow Hour

When a 911 dispatch reports a woman dead on the porch of a Latchmore Lane home at 11:47 p.m., Detective Ira Vancee arrives to find the porch light buzzing, the victim vanished, and the only witness a phone line that rang with no one on the other end. The cul-de-sac lies under a mantle of dead leaves and sodium-orange glow, and every resident offers an alibi with a crack in it. As Vancee digs deeper into the lives of the neighborhood's quiet occupants, a missing person report surfaces that no one filed, and a second porch light begins to flicker. With the November cold pressing in and the evidence evaporating by the hour, the detective must untangle a web of small-town lies, buried connections, and one impossible phone call. The closer he gets to the truth, the more the cul-de-sac starts to feel like a trap closing around him. By dawn, either the caller who wasn't there is finally identified, or Vancee joins them as the next name nobody can find.

20 chapters · 122,329 words · 9h 16m read

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Mystery

The Cathedral Clock

When Iris Calloway steps off the mail coach into the rain-darkened village of Belfry Hollow, she expects nothing more than a quiet posting at the cathedral rectory. Instead, she finds a town measured by the steady, watchful chimes of its ancient clock, and a parish led by the guarded Father Aldous Vesper, who seems to know more about her arrival than he is willing to say. The villagers are courteous but guarded. Lillian Prewett, sharp-eyed and immovable, watches Iris from behind the counter of the village shop. Bram Thorne, broad-shouldered and silent, lingers at the edge of the square as though guarding something he cannot name. Even the local schoolteacher, Wren Halloran, greets her with a warmth that carries the faintest tremor of warning. As Iris settles into the damp stone rooms of the rectory, the cathedral clock begins to falter, skipping an hour at the same moment each evening, its bronze face catching the storm light at angles that feel almost deliberate. With each misplaced chime, old wounds reopen. A letter thought destroyed resurfaces. A name long unspoken is whispered in the pews. The arrival of the Bishop casts a long shadow over Belfry Hollow, and the mayor, Aldous Halloran's own brother, is forced to choose between loyalty to his blood and loyalty to his town. Iris, an outsider with nothing to lose and everything to uncover, must decide how deep she is willing to dig, because the next time the clock strikes, someone may not survive to hear the hour.

20 chapters · 110,577 words · 8h 23m read

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