THE MAUSOLEUM

A lifetime of secrets is slowly revealed in this intricate look
into past murders and present-day guilt.

October 1967 finds Cordelia Hemlock lonely and grief-stricken in
the remote area of the Scottish borderlands hard by Hadrian’s Wall, mourning
her young son who recently died. While lying in a cemetery one day, she’s
approached by Felicity Goose, a local woman destined to become her lifelong
friend. Cordelia and her rarely seen husband bought a house in the area where
they were raising Cordelia’s son, Stefan, the product of a short-lived
university affair that could never end in marriage. Instead, Cordelia accepted
an offer of support for Stefan and herself from a gay, highly placed government
official who needed a wife for cover. The area residents’ dismissal of Cordelia
as a snob has softened since she lost her child. Now, when a sudden storm
catches the two women in the graveyard, a lightning strike fells a tree,
destroying a small crypt and revealing not only ancient bones, but the body of
a much newer corpse in a dark suit. Recovering in Felicity’s house, Cordelia
meets a neighbor named Fairfax Duke, who agrees to go to the cemetery to see
the body Felicity doesn’t want to admit exists. When Fairfax doesn’t return to
Felicity’s house, it turns out that he’s been killed in a car crash. The other
body has disappeared, but the police ask no questions, so Cordelia finds a new
purpose in life investigating what she assumes is a murder. Since the death of
his son in World War II, Fairfax had never stopped asking questions and writing
the stories of everyone in the area who would talk to him, and now he’s left a
rich lode of information for Cordelia. Many of the people he interviewed are
local, but some just never left the area after being released from a POW
camp during World War II. As the story shifts from the 1960s to 2010, appalling
secrets come to light, putting Cordelia in jeopardy while changing her life in
unimaginable ways.

In a departure from his superlative police procedurals (Cold
Bones, 2019, etc.), Mark produces a stand-alone psychological thriller,
character-driven but with plenty of bizarre twists, that’s sure to please fans
of Catriona McPherson.