The cleanest lies are written on official paper.
Kriston Valehart looks for the hand behind the record.

London, 1891. Caroline Mercer has spent years challenging the quiet prejudices of the St. Bartholomew Veterans’ Memorial Trust. Now a memorandum bearing her initials appears to show that she improperly advanced Samuel Pike—the son of a dead sergeant—for a coveted educational award.

Caroline denies writing it.

Called in privately by Caroline’s father, Kriston Valehart and his cousin Edwin begin where respectable institutions prefer not to look: at the paper itself. A private draft has vanished. A shortlist has been altered. An authentic office record now carries a lie.

As public pressure closes around Caroline, Kriston must separate an innocent boy’s merit from the crime committed in his name and trace the unseen route that made the visible fraud possible.

Hand Unseen is the second Valehart Mystery, a Victorian mystery of forged records, institutional prejudice and a detective who knows that the most dangerous hand is often the one nobody sees.