Now it is about to stop.
Sofia Andreyevna Linden reads Sumerian better than half of Oxford. She also has no degree, no country and no money—only a Nansen passport, her late father's magnifying glass, and a letter of recommendation she forged herself in a room above a bootmaker's in Constantinople.
The letter gets her as far as Tell an-Naiha, a lonely excavation in the south of Iraq, where the expedition's epigraphist has just been found dead at the bottom of a trench with a fragment of clay clenched in his fist. It does not get her past Dr. Edmund Hale.
Hale is a survivor of the siege of Kut: a man with a scarred eyebrow, an unlit cigarette and no belief left in anything—least of all in the sound the local workmen walk four miles every evening to avoid. A woman's voice, weeping, from everywhere and nowhere, every night after the moon comes up. He knows the letter is a fake the moment he reads it. He keeps her anyway. He needs someone to read the tablets the dead man was translating.
The tablets turn out to be a lament. But not for a city. For a door.
Between a spiritualist American benefactress and her suspiciously gifted medium, a charming photographer with secrets of his own, two cooks at war, a cat who considers himself the director of the expedition, and a Baltic count in grey gloves who once robbed Sofia's dying father, nobody at Tell an-Naiha is quite what they seem. Finds vanish in the night. Someone is playing the ghost. And the more Sofia reads, the clearer it becomes that the weeping on the hill is not a haunting at all.
It is a lock.
And someone wants it opened.
Told in the wry, knowing voice of a 1920s storyteller and stitched together from diaries, telegrams, police reports and séance transcripts, A Lament in Clay is a slow-burn, closed-door romance wrapped in an archaeological mystery with a gothic, supernatural heart.
Book 1 of the Lady of Tears Duet.
