The Frozen Heiress & the Clearance House: The First and Second Case for the Cocker Lawyer
Matt Borne
Synopsis "The Frozen Heiress & the Clearance House: The First and Second Case for the Cocker Lawyer"
The Frozen Heiress: A wry, hard-bitten solicitor with a bad knee and a brave cocker spaniel walks into a bomb, a fake heiress, and a family conspiracy-then fights to get one real woman her life back.I woke up with one brogue, a dog in my office, and a metal cigar case in my jacket that my gut said would remove me from the gene pool if I pressed the wrong button. That was the start of it. By the time the train reached the Cairngorms I'd got a dead woman on a bed that wasn't the heiress, a fake identity stitched together like bad theatre, and a solicitor who'd decided law was only a suggestion.I'm no detective. I'm a solicitor-an ex-SAS man trying to learn how to do paperwork again. But paperwork doesn't cover explosive devices, locked cellars, or the kind of men who buy other people's silence. So I did the only sensible thing: I used the army part when the law wouldn't do, and the law part when the violence was over. What I didn't expect was for an heiress to stand in my jacket and tell me to sit down. That's how you know a case is personal.* * *The Clearance House: When a routine property serving trip strands a Glasgow solicitor on a storm-locked Hebridean isle, the dogged, ex-regimental lawyer must find a missing satchel and a killer before the storm lifts-or another body is buried by the sea.They told me it would be simple. They lied. One envelope, one signature, one weekend on an island-right up until the ferry went and stopped going. I'm Donald Doan: solicitor, amateur navigator of ruined relationships, and the keeper of a cocker spaniel who has better instincts than most of the people in the Harbour Arms. Eilean Mòr is small, loud about its silence, and very good at keeping secrets. Three days, three deaths, a missing satchel full of cash, and a tunnel under the kirk that smells of old conspiracies: that's what the place offered me.I don't do heroics. I do paperwork, and I ask awkward questions. Those questions found a ledger that names a harbour master, a man in an old man's face who kept weapons under the floor, and a woman whose grudges were older than she was. If you want tidy endings, leave now. If you want the truth, though-if you want the way the sea erases and remembers-sit down. There's room on my pad.
