Hugh Hildebrand expects the funeral to be an obligation, not an inheritance.

A comfortable but aimless Philadelphia attorney, Hugh has met his distant cousin Francis Graeme only once. Then Francis dies suddenly at Hildebrand Hundred, the ancestral Maryland estate of Hugh’s long-estranged family, and a forgotten email summons Hugh south for the funeral and the reading of the will.

By the end of the day, Hugh has inherited everything.

The house. The land. The library. The family history. And the enmity of John Thaneford, whose own family has waited generations to possess the Hundred.

At first, Hugh’s inheritance seems merely awkward: an old estate, a beautiful adopted daughter named Beth Graeme, a resentful neighboring family, and a past full of quarrels no one wants to explain. But the longer Hugh stays, the more impossible Francis’s death becomes. A healthy man died alone in a locked library. A dispatch box was moved and returned. A hidden passage may have been used. A watcher stood on the hill above the house. And Francis was not the first Hildebrand to die in that room.

For decades, men of Hugh’s bloodline have died at Hildebrand Hundred under circumstances accepted as stroke, accident, heart failure, or the will of God. Now Hugh begins to suspect something far more deliberate.

The clues are everywhere: in the stained glass, in the locked room, in the view from Sugar Loaf, in a paralyzed old man’s final message, and in a cipher journal no one can read. As Hugh falls in love with Beth and becomes bound to the estate he never expected to own, he must uncover what Francis discovered before the same hidden force that killed his cousin claims him too.

Some inheritances are gifts.

Some are traps.