The Inheritance

Ninety-nine clocks. One condition. Never let them stop. Hospice nurse Imogen Hale has spent twelve years sitting with the dying. She is broke, exhausted and estranged from her mother, so when a solicitor's letter tells her she has inherited a crumbling manor on the Northumberland moors from a great-aunt she never knew existed, she takes the train north. Wrenfield House comes with forty acres, an ageless housekeeper and a single strange condition. Every clock in the house must be wound by Imogen's own hand, every day, and she must never spend a night away. The will says the house lives on the time they keep. Then one morning Imogen forgets a clock, and the housekeeper drops dead on the scullery floor. When Imogen winds it, she breathes again. Each clock at Wrenfield keeps a life held long past its proper end, and some of those lives are very rich, very powerful and very determined to keep living. Locked in the east wing, among hundreds of stopped clocks, Imogen finds one still ticking. Her name is engraved on the dial with the minute of her birth, and it has been running for thirty-three years. The family solicitor is charming, patient and far older than he should be. He knows exactly what happens when an heir turns thirty-four, and Imogen's birthday is nineteen days away. To escape, she will have to do the one thing she has spent her whole career learning to do: let go. A haunting gothic thriller about grief, inheritance and the dignity of a good death, for readers of Laura Purcell, Susan Hill and Diane Setterfield.