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The Black Crossing
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerHistorical Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 18 2026
Pages: 206
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.47 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A king's courier is found dead under the old Roman bridge, and the reeve wants it written down as a drowning. But there is no water in the man's lungs.
A historical murder mystery novel set in the English fens, December 872. For readers of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael, darker and colder.
He lies face up in the shallows under a Roman pier, good boots still on him and a sealed writ still sewn into his cloak. His hands are black with peat from a country a day downstream, where nobody goes in a war winter. His tongue has been cut out, with a blade and a steady hand.
Brother Stilfrith keeps the ford's book: who crosses, what they carry, what they say they saw. The reeve wants three lines and a drowning, so the crossing can open and the grain can go north on time. The ealdorman wants a name by Christmas. On the far bank stand nine old houses who have kept the water since before there was a king to keep it for. They answer to nobody, and they are not saying what they know.
Five days to Christmas Eve. A ford shut in the frost, a boy who hears his own name called under the causeway planks, and something low in the mist beyond the carts that no man will describe twice. Stilfrith cannot arrest, cannot compel, and holds one instrument: a leaf of vellum, and what he is willing to put on it.
He will know who did it. What costs him is deciding what the record is allowed to say.
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