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Seven Keys to Midnight
Topic: Treasure Hunt
$5.99
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Short Description:
Seven strangers each receive a key engraved with a different symbol and an invitation to Ashcombe Manor, a tidal island off the Cornish coast. By midnight, they must solve six puzzle rooms, built around their own gifts and griefs, to find the one key that opens a vault no force can breach. Get it wrong, and it jams forever. This warm, atmospheric puzzle-box mystery asks what a dead man wanted from people he never met.
Book Details
Pages
114
Language
English
Published
July 2026
Publisher
amacox
ISBN
Book Details:
Seven strangers. Seven keys. One night that isn’t really about a locked door at all. I wrote Seven Keys to Midnight because I love a house that keeps secrets almost as much as the people inside it. When a reclusive locksmith dies and summons seven strangers to his island manor with nothing but a key and a promise, the trap he’s set isn’t the vault, the tide, or the man who arrives uninvited to claim everything if they fail. It’s the six hours he’s given them to figure out why he chose them at all. Each of the seven finds a room built entirely around a grief or a gift only they would recognise — a locksmith who tests every lock she meets, a pianist who hasn’t finished a concert in two years, a grieving sister who reads tides the way others read weather. As the causeway disappears beneath them and the clock edges toward midnight, they discover that Edmund Castellan’s puzzles were never really about the fortune waiting behind a steel door.
If you love a mystery that trusts its readers, characters who feel like people you’d want at your own kitchen table, and an ending that earns its warmth instead of demanding it, this is a book for a single sitting — or a book club evening that runs two hours longer than planned. Cross the causeway. The tide won’t wait, and neither, I’m afraid, will the evening.
About the author
Meet Isla Rhodes
Isla Rhodes grew up in Cullen, a fishing town on Scotland's Moray Firth, where she learned the tide before she learned to read a map. She studied archaeology and conservation at the University of Durham and spent a decade as a collections archivist in a maritime museum, cataloguing logbooks, ships' locks and other things people meant to keep safe. She began writing mysteries at nine, in school exercise books hidden under her bed. Early mornings before work became her writing hours, and rejection letters became a thick folder she keeps. Her first novel found a publisher only after she stopped trying to sound like other writers.
For Isla, a story is a way of paying attention. She starts with a single image, such as a road vanishing under water, then spends months in archives, tide tables and craftspeople's workshops until the details hold. She wants readers to feel curious first, then quietly comforted. Her grandmother, a lifelong gardener, taught her that small kindnesses matter most. Isla admires Daphne du Maurier and Dorothy L. Sayers, drinks too much tea, walks the shingle at dawn, and loses regular arguments with a garden gate. She lives in a former pilot's cottage near Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
