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Dead Weight: The Wrayfell Mysteries
Paperback
ISBN13: 9783991911319
Publisher: Vista Editions
Published: Jun 2 2026
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.49
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
They told her she was mad. They were lying.
Eleanor Nell Calvert was once the most gifted horsewoman her famous breeding family ever produced. Then a mare died on her watch, the story was rewritten, and at twenty she was quietly destroyed - labelled unstable, cast out, erased. Thirteen years on, she is the night-foaling hand at Wrayfell, a beautiful, freezing, money-haunted estate in a remote North Yorkshire dale, and she wants nothing but to be left alone with the horses and the dark.
Then a prize colt - fit, valuable, insured for a fortune - is found dead in his box at dawn, and the estate's tame vet signs it off as colic before her shift is even over. Nell's eye, the one thing they could never take from her, says otherwise. When a frightened stable lad disappears the same week and the whole dale agrees he simply did a runner, she is the only person willing to ask what really happened.
What she finds is a pattern: a healthy horse worth more dead than alive, a death dressed up as misfortune, a witness made to vanish, and a convenient soul left to take the blame. It is the exact shape of the night that ruined her own life. And in her dead mother's stud notebook - a name underlined three times, pressed hard enough to tear the paper - Nell begins to see that the rot runs back forty years, to the lie her entire family has been standing on ever since.
To prove it she will have to trust a silent stallion man with secrets of his own, a vet who has been signing her name to nothing for years, a teenage girl with the same dangerous gift Nell once had, and a forgettable man in a good coat who knew her mother - and who warns her, pleasantly, that the roads up here are worse than they look.
A slow-burning, atmospheric British crime novel for readers of Ann Cleeves, Dick Francis, and Dervla McTiernan, Dead Weight is the first of The Wrayfell Mysteries: a story about horses and money, grief and the long memory of the dead, and what it costs a woman with nothing left to lose to finally stop looking away.
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