The Register

Nobody notices the registrar. She has written them all down anyway. For forty years Hilary Furniss has recorded the official story of Harrowlow, a limestone town in the Derbyshire hills: every birth, every marriage, every death, in the prescribed form, in ink that is not allowed to fade. She has never once written down what she thought. It was not a question on the form. In twelve weeks the office closes. So when Joan Needham, eighty-five, comes down off the dale in the snow to ask how a birth entry is put right "if the mother on it isn't the mother", Hilary knows which entry she means, and says nothing, and gives her the form. A week later Joan is dead, certified natural, and cremated against her written wish. Her daughter comes to finish what her mother started, pays the fee, borrows Hilary's pen, and is found in the mill weir on the Sunday. The town says grief. The police say a woman putting her affairs in order. The coroner says adjourned. Hilary says nothing, as usual. Then she goes down to the vault, where the registers go back to 1837, and starts reading the town's story the way only she can: by who held the pen. The only person who will listen is the funeral director's apprentice, who cannot read a page without photographing it first, and who has been inside more of Harrowlow's houses than anyone except the man he works for. Cold hills. Permanent ink. A signature that was never hers. A completely standalone novel of murder, paperwork and the things people could bear to say, from the author of The Warden and The Verger.