A Murder Without a Body

Edinburgh, 1855. Eleanor Ainslie has an impossible problem: she is alive, but the law says she died six months ago. Her accounts have changed hands, her inheritance has moved, and witnesses swear they saw her corpse. When she asks Octavia Rooke and Mara Venn to find the body buried under her name, the two investigators uncover a fraud built from forged letters, obedient witnesses, legal blind spots, and a dead woman nobody powerful bothered to know.

Octavia can prove the buried body is not Eleanor. Mara can see who benefits from making the lie official. But identifying the stranger in the grave only deepens the mystery—and turns a calculated theft of identity into murder.

As Edinburgh's new civil-registration system gives paper unprecedented authority, Octavia and Mara must decide how much truth the law can bear, and how much of their own shared life they dare make visible.

A Murder Without a Body is a gothic Victorian historical mystery with a fair-play puzzle, morally complex suspects, and a sensual F/F romance.