Ruby Vaughn

1922. Since the Great War, Ruby Vaughn has made a life for herself running a rare bookshop alongside her octogenarian employer and housemate in Exeter. She's always avoided dwelling on the past, but it has a way of finding her. When Ruby must deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she'd never return: Penryth Hall.

Ruby Vaughn's octogenarian employer and housemate Mr Owen said the trip to Manhurst Castle in the Scottish Borders was to appraise some purchases for the bookshop. However, the truth as well as secrets he has been carefully hiding soon unravels. For Mr Owen, who lost a son in the Great War, a trio of mediums billing themselves as The Three Fates are the answer to his desperate wish to speak to him again. But the night of the séance brings with it a murder and Ruby and Mr Owen must uncover the truth about the killing in order to clear their names.

December, 1923. Ruby Vaughn is looking forward to a quiet, relaxing trip to Oxford in the week before Christmas with her octogenarian housemate and colleague Mr Owen. Far away from the arcane, unusual—and occasionally illegal—books that seem to always get her into trouble. The most she expects to do is attend a handful of his antiquarian society meetings. But when the body of disgraced scholar Julius Harker is amongst his exhibition of Egyptian antiquities looted by Napoleon, panic spreads throughout the cobbled streets of Oxford.