Genre

Mystery

Every Mystery title currently on the Dracon shelf.

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Mystery on the shelf

The Aldrich Inheritance

A sealed envelope. Seven heirs. And a dead man's secrets that someone will kill to keep buried. When the patriarch of the Aldrich dynasty dies, his estranged family gathers at the decaying Ashgrove Manor for the reading of his will. Solicitor Vivian Crenshaw arrives at the salt-bitten estate with documents in hand and seven names on her lips , names that have not spoken to one another in years. The parlor has not known guests in seven years, but tonight every velvet chair will be filled by someone carrying a grievance. Bram Aldrich returns to the house that raised him and the sister, Margot, who never left it. His brother Dominic watches the proceedings with a solicitor's patience and a debtor's calculation. Cecily Aldrich clutches the memory of a father who left her nothing in life and may yet deny her in death. A young man named Jonas Pryor appears uninvited, claiming a bloodline the family refuses to acknowledge. Mrs. Halloran, the housekeeper, has kept the rooms aired and the graves tended. And then there are the Vances , Elena, and her daughter Eleanor, whose very presence in the room rewrites the will before it is read. As the lamp burns low and the wind off the sea picks up, the envelope yields its first revelation: the Aldrich fortune will pass entire and unencumbered , but only to the heir who can prove they never wanted it. One by one, the masks slip. One by one, an heir is marked. By dawn, Ashgrove Manor will hold one fewer name on the ledger. The survivors must decide whether to flee with what they have been given, or stay and claim what was always theirs , and risk becoming the next entry in the solicitor's black-bound notebook.

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Elena Blackwood

by Elena Blackwood

The Blackwood Inheritance

A letter slid beneath a door summons Elena Blackwood back to the crumbling estate she swore never to return to. The inheritance is vast. The family is fractured. And the patriarch, Henry Blackwood, is already dead. When Elena arrives at Blackwood Hall, she finds a household of suspects: the brittle housekeeper Mrs. Croft, the sharp-tongued Mathilda Blackwood, the controlling Arthur Voss, and the enigmatic Julian Thorne, whose interest in Elena seems far too personal. Sheriff Marcus Dawson believes the death was no accident, and as the estate's secrets surface, so do bodies. Every locked room conceals another lie, every relative guards another grudge, and the terms of Henry Blackwood's will force Elena to stay, if she wants to claim what is hers. As alliances shift and betrayals mount, Elena must uncover which of the Blackwoods is willing to kill for the inheritance, and whether the curse the family whispered about for generations was never superstition at all.

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Helena Cross

by Helena Cross

The Bone Catalogue

A parcel of human bones, meticulously labeled with name, date, and cause of death, arrives at the Historical Records Office on a fog-lifting Tuesday , and the most recent entry is dated the previous week. Archivist Edmund Vane has spent his career cataloguing the already dead, but this catalogue is unfinished, and someone is still adding to it. Joined by Dr. Abigail Marsh, a sharp-tongued anatomist with her own reasons to distrust the living, and Constable Thomas Hale, whose jurisdiction ends where the Thames begins, Vane follows the bones from mortuary ledgers to drawing rooms where mediums whisper to grieving widows. Miss Octavia Wren, the medium's society patron, and Mrs. Eliza Crowe herself claim the dead are speaking , but the dead, it seems, are being murdered. A masked figure stalks the foggy quays, a baronet's fortune hangs on a disputed burial, and a monk with forgotten oaths knows more than he will say. With each body exhumed, the catalogue grows longer and the killer's pattern more certain. Vane must match his wits against a murderer who already knows how every page ends , because if he fails, the final entry will bear his own name.

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B. Thorne

by B. Thorne

The Bone Garden of Hartwood

A dying judge's midnight summons drags Garret Thorne back to the Hartwood estate, a crumbling mountain mansion he swore never to return to. Judge Cornelius Hartwood, patriarch of a powerful dynasty, is fading fast, but he won't speak until his estranged son stands at his bedside. The reason becomes clear the moment Garret arrives: in the rose garden beneath the frozen earth, a groundskeeper has unearthed human bones wrapped in rotting velvet. Detective Mira Voss is called to investigate, but the family closes ranks around her, Elara Hartwood guards her father's secrets like a dragon hoards gold, while Councilman Marcus Webb works the angles from the shadows. A masked figure known only as the Assailant prowls the estate at night, and Dr. Arthur Vance's quiet demeanor hides something the coroner's report won't explain. As Garret digs into his father's past, he crosses paths with the enigmatic Raven, the enforcers called the Ironclad Operatives, and the old family friend Silas Crowe, whose loyalty is never what it seems. A museum curator in town is selling documents that should have been destroyed years ago, and a young woman named Mags knows more than anyone realizes. With Senator Harlan Beck's name surfacing in connection to a decades-old disappearance, the bones in the garden threaten to bring down more than one powerful house. Garret can unearth the truth and destroy his family, or bury the past and live with what's buried inside him.

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Marcus Vey

by Marcus Vey

The Glass Inheritance

When junior associate Marcus Vey is assigned the estate of a recently deceased client at the prestigious London firm of Pemberton and Hale, he expects little more than dusty files and tedious paperwork. What he finds is a glass box hidden in a safe, a list of names that never reached probate, and a death the police are content to call a suicide. As Marcus begins pulling the threads, he draws the attention of partners prepared to bury the firm's darkest secrets, and finds an unexpected ally in Gerald Pemberton, whose loyalty to the institution masks a far more personal debt. From the wood-panelled lobbies of London to the cliffside estates where old money rewrites its own history, Marcus follows a trail of forged ledgers, vanished heirs, and a bequest no one was meant to claim. But the closer he gets to the truth about the glass inheritance, the more he begins to suspect that his own name has been on someone's list all along. Now he must choose: walk away with a fortune and a future, or burn it all down before the same silence that claimed his client claims him too.

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S. Croft

by S. Croft

The Hollow Bell

Dawn mist rises off the creek and pools in the dips of the old road when Silas Croft begins his daily walk through the hollow, the same route his boots have traced for forty years. But this morning, the briar at the creek's edge holds something it was never meant to give up: a body, and a memory of a bell that hasn't rung in living memory. As suspicion settles over the hollow's quiet residents, Silas is drawn into an investigation the sheriff would rather leave cold, and neighbors begin watching one another through drawn curtains. Old loyalties resurface, old debts come due, and Silas must decide how much of his own buried past he is willing to unearth to find the truth. With Edgar Pruitt's measured silences, Della Meeks's knowing glances, and Wren Calloway's questions that cut too close, the hollow is no longer the quiet place it pretended to be. The bell has rung, and what it has woken will not rest until someone answers for what lies beneath the briar.

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A. Vance

by A. Vance

The Hollow Ledger

A forgotten ledger names the corrupt, and someone is burning the city down to bury the truth. Reclusive archivist Aria Vance has spent her life buried in old records, but nothing has prepared her for what she finds wedged inside a donated box of county papers: a ledger listing every official bribed, every case buried, and every name traded in decades of quiet corruption. The entries name a respected judge, a powerful crime patriarch, and men in suits who answer to neither. Within hours of her discovery, arson begins tearing through the city, one fire for every page of evidence. Deputy Maren Holt, the only investigator willing to look past the convenient conclusions pushed by her superiors, finds herself chasing a pattern that no one else will acknowledge. As the body count rises and the ledger's names begin to die alongside the flames, Aria realizes the book was never forgotten, it was hidden, and its owners want it back. Caught between a judge who controls the courts, an enforcer who controls the streets, and an arsonist whose signature burns brighter with every reveal, Aria and Maren must decide what they're willing to risk. Expose the conspiracy and become the next name on the list, or walk away and let the ledger of forgotten names turn to ash.

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A. Thane

by A. Thane

The Lapse Protocol

Axel Thane has spent two years hiding in the converted loft above a shuttered locksmith on Callow Street, surviving on encrypted dead-drop messages and cold coffee. But the message that arrives at 2:47 a.m. on a Tuesday isn't for him, it's evidence, and it names the Meridian PD sniper who killed two officers and walked free. When Vivian Calloway of the department's internal affairs shows up asking the same questions, Axel is forced back into the case that buried his career and cost him his partner. With his source Mara Quinn feeding him fragments from inside the department and a Calloway dynasty circling the wagons to protect its own, every hour spent digging puts another name on a sniper's list. Vivian's sister Lillian and her estranged husband Declan each hold a piece of a puzzle tied to a defunct biotech firm, a missing researcher, and a coroner named Dr. Yara Osei who knows how the bullets really traveled. As the rain traces crooked lines down Axel's window, the night's clock keeps ticking toward a single decisive moment: trust the cop who never believed him, or vanish into the static with the only proof that the shooter isn't a ghost, he's still on the force. When the final message arrives, it won't matter who pulled the trigger. Only who decided to look away.

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M. Vane

by M. Vane

The Ledger of Graves

A murdered teen in a drainage ditch. A journalist digging too deep. A conspiracy that buries its own. When Reed Hale stumbles upon a dead girl in a drainage ditch on his family's rural Fayette County property, the case should be simple, but nothing about it is. Reporter Marcus Vane picks up the trail and quickly finds himself circling a web of powerful figures who want the truth interred alongside the victim. As Marcus, his sister Naomi, and investigator Lila Crane press forward, threats escalate, evidence vanishes, and allies fall silent. With a shadowy network of operatives closing in, Marcus must decide how far he'll go before he becomes the next name in a ledger no one was supposed to find.

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W. Marsh

by W. Marsh

The Quiet Before the Fall

Winnie Marsh has not set foot in Marshfield, Vermont, in two years. The rusted welcome sign leaning west and the faint smell of cider drifting down Main Road are exactly as she remembers, and exactly why she stayed away. When urgent news from home forces her return, Winnie steps back into a town that has been holding its breath without her. Aunt Clara is waiting with answers she will not quite give. Sheriff Dale Brennan watches the new arrivals with eyes that miss nothing. Harold Vance, Ruby Pratt, Tess Lindgren, Reverend Marjorie Hines, Owen Marsh, Frank Dodds, and the rest of the old neighbors circle one another with the careful politeness of people protecting long-held secrets. Winnie came home to settle the past, but Marshfield is not finished with her. A quiet has settled over the orchards and the clapboard houses, the kind of silence that settles in before something breaks. As she sorts through old loyalties, half-told stories, and the kind of truths a small town buries for generations, Winnie must decide how much of the silence she is willing to disturb, and whether the cost of finally speaking will be hers alone to pay.

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Lucas Vale

by Lucas Vale

The Vale of Silent Bones

Lucas Vale left Hawk's Hollow twenty years ago and never looked back. Now a drifting journalist with more ghosts than bylines, he returns only because his estranged brother Elias has stopped answering the phone. What he finds is worse than silence: a hollow town bleeding out, an empty church bell tower, and a construction crew that has just unearthed a skeleton in the basement of the First Baptist Church. The bones are old, but the questions they raise are fresh and dangerous. Who is buried beneath the floorboards? Why has the official record of Hawk's Hollow's past been scrubbed clean? And why does the man with the rifle keep appearing wherever Lucas digs? Teaming up with Maren Cole, a deputy whose loyalty to the badge is stronger than her loyalty to the town, Lucas begins to unravel a web of disappearances, corrupt land deals, and a family secret that has been rotting in the dark since before he was born. As the pressure builds, the shooter's patience thins, and an innocent young woman named Annie Brooks begins asking the same questions Lucas is. To survive Hawk's Hollow, Lucas must choose between the truth that could save the town and the lie that has kept it alive. Some bones were meant to stay buried. Others refuse to rest.

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A. Dane

by A. Dane

The Weight of Ashes

Fifteen years after leaving Brackmoor in the rain and never looking back, Aric Dane steps off a late-night bus with a single canvas duffel and the uneasy sense that the town has been holding his place for him. Almost everyone he once knew has a version of the night he left, and none of them agree. A chance meeting with Elise Calloway, a sharp-eyed woman with her own questions about the past, pulls Aric into an investigation he never asked for. The more he digs, the more the town resists: Maren Holt, whose quiet grief masks something harder; his brother Cal, whose loyalties are no longer clear; Garrett Sloane, a journalist who believes the truth is worth any cost; and the unsettling Victor Halverston, whose interest in Aric's return borders on obsession. When a death that was ruled an accident fifteen years ago refuses to stay buried, Aric must choose between the life he's built in the distance and the ash-covered answers waiting in the only place he ever called home. Some returns are a second chance. Others are a reckoning.

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