the dilemma of a dead scholar

At Wycliffe Manor, a legendary pirate treasure draws danger... .

Bestselling author Patricia Rice brings you another haunting country house mystery in Regency England. . .

An heiress haunted by ghosts, Dotty Dorothea knows her family believes her mad. Fearing fortune hunters who would lock her and her awkward little brother in an asylum, she flees behind the ancient walls of Wycliffe Manor.

A French artist and émigré, his soul bearing scars from a French prison, Comte Arnaud Lavigne has lost everything to war. His only foreseeable future is restoring bad artwork in his cousin’s decrepit manor. Mad heiresses aren’t his concern, until the day a mathematical scholar is murdered. The deceased leaves a coded journal that might lead to Wycliffe Manor’s lost treasure-inside the sealed tower the terrified heiress swears is haunted.

Ghosts don’t exist as far as Arnaud is concerned, but killers and thieves are real, especially when stolen treasure is involved. How is he to work with the dotty heiress when neither of them trusts the other-or themselves? But the inhabitants of Wycliffe Manor, young and old, are in peril unless a heartless killer and thief is caught. . .