A Talent For Disappearing

A wedding on Lake Como. A charming host dead at the foot of the wine-cellar stairs. And one guest who notices the single detail that turns an accident into murder.

Frances Wren has spent forty years as a travel writer, learning to read a room the way other people read a menu — the lie beneath the smile, the grief beneath the toast, the guest who wants something and the guest who is about to be hurt. Since her husband died, the gift has become a burden she has tried to put down. So when an old friend offers her a spare seat at a lavish family wedding in a borrowed castello above Lake Como, it promises exactly what she needs: three days of being nobody at all, watching beautiful strangers be beautiful at one another.

Then, on the very first night, the family's silver-haired patriarch — the man everyone adored — is found dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs. A drunken misstep, the doctor rules. A tragedy, the family agrees, dabbing their eyes and quietly deciding that the wedding will go on.

But Frances has seen the one thing that does not belong: the dead man's reading glasses, folded neatly in his pocket. A man who could not read a wine label without them, who supposedly went alone into a dark cellar to choose a bottle — with his glasses put carefully away.

It is such a small wrong thing. And once she has seen it, she cannot stop seeing the rest: the guests who can't quite explain how they know the family, the buried history no one will name, the celebration that is not really a wedding at all. When a second death follows the first, Frances understands that the killer never left — that they are smiling somewhere among the candlelight, and have begun to notice her noticing.

To catch them, she will have to do the thing she swore she would never do again: open the eye all the way, in a house full of people she has come to like, and find the one whose kindness is the most dangerous thing on the mountain.

A Talent for Disappearing is the first Frances Wren Mystery — an atmospheric, elegantly plotted 'vacation mystery' for readers who love a fair-play puzzle, a setting that takes part in the crime, and an older heroine no one ever thinks to watch. Perfect for fans of Richard Osman, Robert Thorogood's Marlow Murder Club, and the warm, morally serious mysteries of Ann Cleeves.

Pour a glass of something cold, find a chair with a view of the water, and let Frances show you what everyone else has missed.

Publisher - BookVAULT Publishing

Language - English

Perfect Bound

Contributors

By author

Margot Thornbury

Published Date - 2026-07-15

ISBN - 9781806546282

Dimensions - 19.7 x 13.2 x 1.3 cm

Page Count - 230