THE SEVENTH STONE

Northumberland, the present day. Christine Marsh is sixty-three, newly retired, and clearing out her late aunt's sideboard when she finds a ring at the back of a tin that once held travel sweets - small, dark-stoned, its band scored with six neat marks and a seventh that doesn't seem to belong.
She puts it on. She doesn't take it off again.
Days later, a message arrives from a stranger: a retired academic in an Italian mountain village she has never heard of, careful and increasingly urgent. I need to ask you not to wear this again until we've spoken properly. I recognise the seventh mark from research of my own. The message breaks off mid-sentence. Its sender is dead within the hour, in a car that leaves a road he has driven a thousand times, swerving for a deer that was never actually struck by anything at all.
Christine flies to Roccalba to find out what a dying stranger was trying to tell her, and finds instead a village priest guarding an eighty-year-old secret inside a wayside shrine, a Maresciallo whose case files keep filling up with things that don't add up, and the granddaughter of a Nazi researcher finishing work her family began at a rock formation in the Teutoburg Forest in 1935 - work that ended, eleven years and one desperate journey along the old escape routes out of a defeated Germany later, with a fragment of stone hidden beneath a plaster Madonna by a frightened young man who could never quite explain, even to the priest who took him in, what exactly he had carried out of the ruins of his own country.
Six fragments, scattered and lost. One keystone, kept safe by four generations of silence in a village nobody outside it had reason to know the name of. And a woman who taught mathematics to bored teenagers for thirty-one years, discovering - rather later in life than she ever expected to - precisely what she is capable of when it actually matters.
A sequel to The Keeper of Glass, The Seventh Stone is a richly atmospheric mystery about inheritance, faith, and the long, quiet cost of keeping a secret honestly. It moves between a Northumberland kitchen table, a hillside cemetery in Abruzzo, and the scarred ground of a 1935 German survey site - and asks what an ordinary person owes to a truth that was never theirs to find, once it has found them instead.