Sleight of Snow

Snow is the only editor that cuts everything and keeps no rushes. Iris Wren knows all about cutting — she spends her days as a film continuity girl, trained to catch the exact instant a scene stops matching itself. So when her motorcar dies on a snowbound Pennine moor and the single lit window of Coldharbour House draws her in from the storm, she notices at once that something in this strange glass-walled house is wrong. The clocks are stopped at different hours. Stage apparatus sleeps under dust-sheets. And an old magician waits, mirror upon mirror throwing back a life he can no longer bear to look at.

Sebastian Vane — once the celebrated Great Sebastiano, now disgraced — has gathered the very people who helped bury the truth about his vanished assistant. By morning, he means to confess everything and remake his will. But morning brings only snow against the glass, a severed telephone line, and Vane lying dead behind the iron-bolted door of his workshop. No footprints mark the drifts. The frightened doctor blames a weak heart. Iris sees something no one else will admit: the room has been dressed, staged like a film set to tell a lie.

Cut off by the thaw that won't come, the snowbound guests begin to turn on one another. When a second convenient death follows, Iris must reconstruct one impossible hour and unmask a killer who hides behind a magician's own tricks — before the road reopens and lets the truth slip quietly away.

Marian Ellory conjures a classic locked-room puzzle in the golden tradition, told in a voice as sharp and haunted as the woman telling it: witty, watchful, and quietly grieving. Atmospheric, ingeniously plotted, and impossible to put down, Sleight of Snow is a mystery for anyone who loves a fair-play puzzle and a heroine who refuses to look away.

Step inside the snow-locked house. The clock is already lying.