Clara Sterling

When Clara Sterling isn’t plotting a molecular crisis or a galactic mystery, she can be found experimenting with sourdough, researching vintage gadgets, or negotiating with a very stubborn dachshund.

When ethnobotanist Mara Fenn leaves Oxford for the Cornish village of Fernwick Bay, she wants solitude, not suspicion. She opens an apothecary in the old post office, names it The Still Room, and plans to lose herself in herbs, tinctures, and the quiet discipline of useful work.

Then Gerald Penrose—the man who wrote to her about her late husband—dies before he can tell her what he knew.

The police call it cardiac arrest. Mara knows better. In Penrose’s greenhouse she spots the signs of aconitum used with expert precision, and once she starts looking closely, Fernwick Bay begins to look less like a refuge and more like a village built on things people have agreed not to say out loud.

With a wary detective sergeant asking questions of his own, a cat who disapproves of nearly everyone, and a dead man’s warning pointing back toward Daniel’s hidden work in Cornwall, Mara follows the evidence where it leads: to murder, to long-buried loyalties, and to the possibility that her husband’s death was never an accident.