A rifle shot cracks across the park at The Towers, and Mortimer Harlow falls dead on the front steps of his Hertfordshire estate.

To the village, Harlow is a remote and powerful financier. To the City of London, he is the head of a fund already shadowed by a stalled Serious Fraud Office inquiry. To his family, he is something harder to name: father, trustee, tyrant, protector, and threat.

The evidence points quickly to his younger son, Robert. The murder weapon appears to be Robert’s .450 Express rifle. Robert had quarreled violently with his father days earlier. He has vanished. Footprints in Quarry Wood seem to place him at the firing position.

Perhaps too neatly.

Detective Chief Superintendent Jonathan Winter and Detective Inspector Charles Fournier arrive from Scotland Yard to find that the local constable has already done something rare: preserved the truth before anyone knew which part of it mattered. A painter on the public footpath saw a young woman swim in the lake, a window open at the house, and the estate settle into the fatal rhythm of an ordinary morning. A fragile stepmother may have been watching from the wrong room. A ward’s inheritance is about to be audited. And in London, a missing tranche of securities suggests that Mortimer Harlow’s death may be less a family tragedy than a financial necessity.

At The Towers, every path has been walked before. Every footprint may have been planted. Every witness has something to protect.

And the murderer has prepared the ground.

Elegant, intricate, and classically suspenseful, WINTER’S GROUND is a country-house murder mystery of money, inheritance, false evidence, and fatal composure — where the quietest observation may prove more dangerous than the loudest accusation.