Victoria Lane's Journal

When investigative journalist Victoria Lane inherits her great-aunt’s Somerset cottage, she expects a quiet summer sorting through an old woman’s belongings. What she finds instead is sixty years of secrets—filed by decade, annotated in three colors. Agnes Ashdown kept records on everything: the village, the festival, the people who passed through both. And at the center of her archive, hidden inside a landscape painting no one thought to question, lies an envelope Agnes spent a lifetime waiting to open.

Then the gallery owner is found dead.

As Tor works through Agnes’s papers—with the help of a careful local GP and a village postmistress who remembers more than she says—she uncovers a pattern of fraud, a stolen identity, and a painting whose true history reaches back to Vienna, 1939, and a family who never came back for it.

The Thornevale Arts Festival is sixty years old and undeniably beautiful.

What it was built on is something else entirely.

The Painter’s Bequest is the first novel in the Victoria Lane’s Journal series.