Some warnings are written in thread. This one was woven in blood-red.
Seren Vaughan weaves only true things. For three years she has kept that promise, working her grandmother's great loom in a stone shed above a quiet Welsh valley, giving the village its shawls and its blankets and nothing it did not ask for. Then, on the last grey Tuesday before the Nantcoed Show, her hands betray her.
She comes back to herself at dusk to find a length of cloth she does not remember making ? and woven into it, in scarlet she never threaded, a picture: dark water, a turning mill-wheel, and a figure falling to its death. It is not a shawl. It is a warning. And Seren knows the wheel.
She has seen deaths in the weave before. She has never yet managed to stop one.
As the valley fills with fair-day crowds and old grudges stir beneath the folk-song and the bunting, Seren races to read the rest of the omen before the thread runs out ? who the falling figure is, and whose hand will send them under. But the closer she looks, the more the pattern points somewhere she cannot bear to follow: to someone she loves, in a village where everyone's secrets are knotted together, and where the truth, once pulled, will unravel far more than a single life.
If you love:
- Atmospheric village mysteries steeped in folklore and second sight
- A quiet, gifted heroine who is a local, not a newcomer
- Welsh valleys, old looms, and a death foretold before it falls
- A fair-play whodunit with a warning woven through every page
- Cozy mysteries with a thread of the uncanny and no gore or spice
A haunting, atmospheric standalone mystery for readers who like their villages small, their secrets old, and their warnings written in red.
Sit at the loom. See what the thread already knows.
