The Heraldry of Lot 14

Cozy Mystery · Sweet / closed door · 26 chapters + epilogue · 65K novel · 1st person

Complete planning package, 81 pages: the premise, a full codex, every chapter outlined, an AI prompt for every chapter, and the whole launch kit — listing, blurb, keywords, posts, newsletter, reader magnet — already written. One buyer only. When it’s claimed, it’s gone.

Phoebe Vane has built a quiet career on other people's dead relatives — verifying lineages, authenticating heirlooms, finding the document that proves what a family wants proved and occasionally the one that proves the opposite.

Then she opens the archive at Aldermere Hall and finds a forgery forty years in the making.

Before she can decide what to do with it, there's the archivist's private correspondence log showing six undisclosed meetings with the solicitor who hired her, a Latin annotation in the margin of the oldest pedigree document that only a professional would recognise as a confession, an uncatalogued box tucked in the back of Lot 14 that contains the three documents the forgery was built to erase, and a body in the locked archive room before she can tell anyone what she's found — locked, she'll eventually understand, from the outside.

She's spent her career treating neutrality as her whole professional identity: she finds what the records say and reports it, and what happens next is not her responsibility. That position has never cost her anything she couldn't afford to lose. He left his mainland detective post after his own careful, overruled judgment cost an innocent man a year of his life, and he's spent eleven years since managing other people's truths in a country house legal practice rather than testing his own again. Neither of them can name the killer — or trust each other — without choosing honesty over the habit of self-protection they've both mistaken for competence.

A traditional, closed-door English country-house mystery for readers who want a fair-play puzzle they can actually solve. The kind of book where the most dangerous person in the house is the one who knows how to read a document.

WHAT’S INSIDE THIS PACKAGE

⭐️ Story Premise — high-concept pitch, elevator pitch, and Market-Matched™ validation with dual-category positioning (Amateur Sleuth, Historical) and competitive analysis against three real comp titles

⭐️ Complete Codex — full story bible with two main characters, supporting cast of six, Aldermere Hall archive room-by-room detail and walled garden, five-day chapter-by-chapter timeline, Phoebe's evidence-language first-person voice system (thinks in documents, hedges with "the record suggests," humour that takes a beat to land), romantic progression mapped beat by beat from professional wariness to the epilogue phone call, seven-clue fair-play trail with three red herrings tracked stage by stage, and series seeds for three future books

⭐️ Chapter-by-Chapter Outline — 26 chapters + epilogue with emotional beats, word count targets, scene breakdowns, and clue-placement notes for every chapter

⭐️ AI-Ready Chapter Prompts — 27 fresh-chat-ready writing prompts with embedded character voice, clue guidance (planted as professional observation, never flagged early), Oliver's first-name shift locked to Chapter 19, and the exact chapter where Lot 14 stops being a catalogue entry and becomes a crime scene

⭐️ Amazon Launch Kit — the listing, written: Amazon listing with categories and keywords, back cover copy, and Ideogram cover prompt

⭐️ Reader & Promo Kit — social media posts, newsletter announcement, and reader magnet concepts including a prequel forgery case as an exclusive bonus

⭐️ Market-Matched™ Brief — market snapshot table, six data-backed positioning bullets, comp title differentiation, full 7-keyword KDP strategy, and launch positioning with cover direction and series readthrough strategy

You write the book. The listing, the blurb, the keywords, the posts, the newsletter and the reader magnet are already written.

One buyer. One story. Exclusively yours.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Amateur Sleuth carries a 100 sales-to-comp index (Hot Mainstream) with 170 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the single strongest dedicated mystery category tracked

→ Dual-category positioning with Mystery > Historical unlocks a second active list ($89K estimated monthly royalties) via the genealogical research hook — no period-setting overhead required

→ Wedding occasion is the highest-royalty occasion trope in the dataset at $89K monthly and rising — the four-day countdown gives the book built-in structural urgency

→ Fraud as primary crime carries a 58 sales-to-comp index — stronger than most murder subtypes — used by only 1.1% of current titles

→ Zero direct competitors for a genealogical-forgery premise in the current Top 100, despite mainstream cultural appetite for lineage-and-secrets plots

→ Specialist-knowledge protagonist differentiates cleanly from the saturated culinary and craft-hobby amateur sleuth the current Top 20 is built around

TROPES:
• Amateur sleuth with specialist knowledge
• Manor archive setting
• Wedding countdown frame
• Forged pedigree murder
• Inheritance-driven crime
• Slow-burn closed-door romance
• Country-house-party suspects
• Fair-play whodunit
• The Expert Who Knows Too Much
• Records Don't Lie (But People Do)
• The Solicitor Who Tells Half the Truth
• Proof of Character as Grand Gesture

HEAT LEVEL: Sweet / Closed Door

Perfect for fans of: Rebecca Tope, Merryn Allingham, M.C. Beaton, and Dee MacDonald

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