Old Broadbrim Following Up a Golden Clew

A Quaker detective in a world that doesn't trust quiet men.

Josiah Broadbrim has seen enough of human darkness to know that murder rarely announces itself cleanly. But when a body surfaces from the bottom of Silver Lake — a bullet hole in the temple, a mysterious golden cross clutched in cold fingers — even Old Broadbrim feels the chill of something deeper than a simple killing.

The dead man is a stranger on Long Island soil. Someone brought him here deliberately. Someone wanted him beneath those still waters, weighted down and forgotten, his identity dissolving with his flesh. And whoever arranged it is still close — watching the treeline, watching the lake, watching Broadbrim himself.

The golden cross is the only clue. An heirloom centuries old, tied to a crumbling English estate and a missing heir who crossed an ocean and vanished into shallow water. The men who drowned him wanted that cross to disappear with the body. They were afraid of it.

That fear tells Broadbrim everything.

Now he moves through the wooded shadows of Babbington Manor — a place rotting from the inside out, haunted by old money and older secrets — piecing together a conspiracy that reaches from Long Island farmland to the drawing rooms of London.

The killers know he's there.

And the longer Broadbrim holds that gleaming golden cross, the more he wonders whether the heirloom's ancient curse is already working — on him.

Can he unmask the killer before the evidence disappears again — permanently?