By Jane Anstey

Dark family secrets in an ancient Cornish manor house create a spooky mystery for Reverend Jeremy Swanson to investigate during Lockdown 2020.

“We simply must get into that priest hole,” declared Jeremy.

Cornwall during the darkest days of Lockdown 2020. Families are isolated from loved ones, social life is in abeyance, and a strange, abnormal quiet prevails, but at Tresayne, an ancient manor house on the edge of Bodmin Moor, secrets emerge that will change the lives of Jeannette, her daughter Olivia, and her husband Theo, forever.

As restrictions ease, Theo’s son Marcus comes to Cornwall to rekindle his relationship with his estranged father, and get to know his stepmother and his adopted sister. He finds Olivia obsessed with the death of her own father, which Jeannette refuses to discuss. But when ghostly wailing is heard in one of the bedrooms, still darker secrets begin to emerge about the family’s history.

Who is crying, and why is it a stranger who hears her? And what is the connection with a long-lost diary from the time of World War One? Reverend Jeremy Swanson, house-sitting in a nearby cottage, finds himself drawn into the mystery. To solve it, he and the Tresayne family must discover an ancient priest-hole, built into the house but sealed and long forgotten, and face the horrors perpetrated there long ago.