Exclusive Excerpt: House of Thieves by Rachel Walkley ~ #BookTour

House of Thieves

At Terrington Hall, objects are treasured while people are forgotten.

Chief conservator Amy is restoring the Hurly family’s guilt-stained hoard when a theft forces her to hire Harrison, a security adviser on a personal quest to uncover his own history.

Unknown to anyone, an invisible presence woven into the fabric of the house watches their every move.

When Harrison uncovers a room sealed for decades, the investigation shifts from simple theft to the resurrection of murderous secrets. In a house where the past is too heavy to escape, the dead don’t need bodies to tell their stories — they just need someone to listen.

One house. Two mysteries. Two centuries apart.

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For centuries, Terrington Hall belonged to the Hurly family before becoming a charitable trust. As chief conservator, Amy manages the estate’s vast collection. From the shadows, an unseen soul watches, somebody intimately familiar with the house’s history, but entirely unaware of their own forgotten past.

With the house about to close to the public, Amy and her assistant discover a locket has gone missing from a display cabinet.

Amy navigates the various bureaus and commodes. Many are little more than a few decades old, but abandoned among the mediocre pieces, the room does host two prized cabinets with Chinese marquetry. As the collection grew over many years, nobody particularly cared where to store objects and frequently lumped together artwork from the Americas with those from the Far East. To make matters worse, hardly anything had been systematically catalogued. Amy routinely complains about the lack of provenance in telephone calls to her superiors. The hotchpotch of artefacts ensures Terrington Hall remains both fascinating and infuriating to its current custodians.

‘Here,’ Isla says, eventually, after a turning many pages, and she summons Amy back to her side. ‘Six silver lockets made in Paris for Sir John Hurly, the first baronet, around 1690. Each one given to one of his daughters – he had six. Upon his death, each one was returned to Terrington Hall. The descriptions aren’t great.’

‘And somebody has taken one.’ Amy reads off the descriptions, identifying all but one, a most important keepsake that needs to be found. ‘This has to be it. The biggest, for the oldest daughter and engraved with a rose, the heart of which contained a ruby. No mention of what the locket contained. Now I’m going to have to go through the 1950s inventory to see if there are photographs.’

‘Is that a big deal?’ Isla asks.

‘From what I’ve found out since I arrived here – yes. The pre-sales audit was an utter fiasco. There wasn’t the money or time to do it properly.’

‘This is the inventory put together for the purchase of the house?’

Amy nods. ‘The cousins responsible for negotiating with the British Heritage Trust fell out. A lot of the paperwork was destroyed in a fire at the family’s house in London. It meant the Trust accepted the house and contents on the back of a really bad deal.’

‘Why did they go ahead?’

Amy waves her arm at the cluttered room. ‘They predicted the public would want to see this kind of stuff and they were right. Visitors have been flocking here ever since.’

I recall the first time the cacophony of trampling shoes shattered the quiet days of Terrington Hall. Ropes were erected around furniture, snaking their way from one end of the house to the other, creating a trail through the maze of rooms. It’s hard to forget the disruption caused by the opening of the house to the public.

Rachel Walkley is a former librarian and scientist who lives in the North West of England, where she spends her spare time making music and writing. Her debut novel, The Women of Heachley Hall, was a bestseller in the UK and Australia. Known for weaving together family secrets, magical mysteries, old houses and inspirational women, Rachel also writes gripping female-led crime novels under the pen name Rae Shaw.

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