The New Tenant

A stranger leases Falcon’s Nest, a stone cottage perched over the Northshire cliffs, and gives his name as Bernard Brown. He offers nothing else about himself. Then Sir Geoffrey Kynaston, a baronet home after fifteen years abroad, is found on the moor near that cottage with a dagger through his heart, and the new tenant is the man everyone looks at. Helen Thurwell has more reason than most to want the truth, since the dead man was her fiancé, and less appetite than she expected for the answer the county has already settled on. Oppenheim published this in 1896, near the start of a career that ran past a hundred books, and the pieces he would use for decades are already here: a false name, an old scandal, a quiet English estate with something wrong under it.