The Winter Settlement by Donald Strong

A stranger lies dead at the bottom of a frozen ravine, and everyone in Black Hollow agrees on what happened.

He fell.

Called to the isolated settlement in the depths of winter, Sir Alaric finds a village already certain of the truth. Jonas Krail went out during a storm, lost his footing, and died in the snow. The villagers repeat the story calmly and without hesitation.

But the closer Alaric looks, the less certain anything becomes.

The marks in the ravine do not match a simple fall. Jonas carried none of the belongings a traveler should have possessed. Witnesses disagree about when he was last seen, where he was walking, and whether the storm had even begun. Yet no matter how their memories differ, every account arrives at precisely the same ending.

As snow closes the roads and steadily erases what little evidence remains, Alaric begins to suspect that Black Hollow is hiding more than the circumstances of one man’s death. Jonas had been asking questions about the settlement before he died—and beneath the villagers’ carefully maintained silence lies something older than the mystery that brought Alaric there.

To uncover the truth, he must determine not only what happened in the ravine, but why an entire community has chosen to remember it differently.

The Winter Settlement is the second book in The Alaric Investigations, a historical mystery series of isolated places, buried secrets, and a former knight who has learned that the most dangerous lies are often the ones everyone agrees to believe.