She didn't fall by accident.
London, 1929. A woman lies dead below her own window. The verdict is too tidy.
Agnes Lyle fell from a first-floor window of her house in Belgravia. The police surgeon calls it an accident. The inquest will agree. The hands are clean, the house was locked, and there is nothing more to see.
Reginald Hargrove is not a detective. He runs an oil company, and he has spent his life reading the small wrong detail that a confident report glosses over: the figure that does not add up, the ground that says one thing while the map says another. Asked, almost in passing, to look again, he finds a room that will not stay tidy, a coat left hanging where it should not be, and a pair of hands too clean for a woman who fell.
What he uncovers is quieter and colder than an accident, and it will cost a decent man the comfort of looking away.
Clean Hands is the case that first drew Reginald Hargrove from his desk to the reading of other people's lives. A complete mystery in its own right, it is the prequel to the Reginald Hargrove Mysteries, and the perfect place to begin. It leads directly into the first novel, The Crimson Scarf.
For readers of Robert Harris, Charles Todd, and Jacqueline Winspear.
