England, 1923. Two women share the same face. Only one of them is real.
When society hostess Vivienne Ashworth is found dead in her locked drawing room, a silver-handled letter opener buried in her chest and her expression frozen in disbelief, the local constabulary concludes she fell victim to a common burglar. Inspector Edmund Rowe is not so certain. The room was locked from the inside. Nothing was stolen. And the only mirror in the room, an ornate, floor-length antique, has been turned to face the wall.
What begins as a murder investigation in the fog-wrapped market town of Ashwell Cross quickly reveals itself to be something far more disturbing. Vivienne Ashworth, it emerges, was not the woman she appeared to be. For three years she had been living the life of another woman entirely, a woman who vanished from a Sussex estate in 1920 and was never found. A woman whose family quietly paid to have the matter buried, along with the investigation and the truth.
Inspector Rowe, a war-damaged detective with an instinct for patterns that others dismiss as obsession, begins pulling at threads that unravel not just one family's secrets but a network of forgery, identity theft, and cold-blooded calculation that stretches from the drawing rooms of the English countryside to the corridors of Whitehall. At the centre of it all is a question that Inspector Rowe cannot stop asking: if the dead woman was not Vivienne Ashworth, then who is Vivienne Ashworth, and where is she now?
Set against the glittering, hollow world of 1920s England, a society still flinching from the wounds of the Great War, reinventing itself with jazz and cocktails and deliberate forgetting, The Mirror Kills is a richly atmospheric historical mystery thriller that explores identity, obsession, and the dangerous art of becoming someone else.
Fans of Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and Jacqueline Winspear will find in Inspector Rowe a detective of rare depth: methodical, quietly relentless, and haunted by the suspicion that the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.
Perfect for readers who love:
- Historical mystery fiction set in 1920s England between the wars
- Psychological crime thrillers with unreliable identities and double lives
- Detective fiction with intelligent, complex female characters
- Atmospheric period mysteries with social intrigue and class tension
- Page-turning whodunits where the victim is as mysterious as the killer
In The Mirror Kills, you will find:
- A locked-room murder with a solution that genuinely surprises
- A richly researched 1920s English setting that feels authentic on every page
- A detective whose methods are as compelling as the mystery he unravels
- Themes of identity, forgery, and the price of reinvention
- A completely resolved mystery, no cliffhanger, full and satisfying justice
Who is reflected in the mirror? And which woman did the mirror kill?
Reads as a complete standalone The Novel with a suspense and mystery.
