This Is Miles's Book

Cressida Vale gets to be the one readers notice first. She's sharp-tongued, she walks into rooms like she already owns the answer, and she has never once apologized for being right. Miles Stone, by contrast, is the one you underestimate — right up until you don't.

Which is exactly why The Case of the Ember Mill Haunting had to be his book.

Who Miles Actually Is

Miles did not sign up to become a consulting detective. He got pulled into it by Cressida — his childhood best friend, the person who has never once let him sit quietly with anything — and somewhere along the way, being good at it stopped being an accident.

He's deadpan. He notices everything and says almost none of it out loud, until the moment he says exactly the right thing and it lands like a small earthquake. He's the partner who listens first, and in a duo built around Cressida's instinct-led brilliance, that's not a lesser gift. It's the other half of how they actually solve anything.

Why Ember Mill Tests Him Specifically

Book 1 let Miles exist mostly in Cressida's orbit — present, essential, but reactive. Ember Mill changes that, because this case isn't happening to Blackvale in the abstract. It's happening somewhere close to Miles's own history, in ways the book doesn't hand you all at once.

Watching someone who built his whole personality around staying composed get cracked open by something personal — that's the kind of character work I wanted to do, and Miles earned the chance to be the one it happens to.

What This Means for Cressida and Miles

Their partnership has always run on trust and dry wit, never on romantic tension — that's not what this series is doing, and it's not what this book does either. But trust gets tested differently when one partner is the one unraveling. Watching Cressida figure out how to be useful to someone who doesn't ask for help is its own kind of quietly devastating.

This is Miles's book. He didn't ask for that either. He's getting it anyway.

The Case of the Ember Mill Haunting releases July 28. It's available for preorder now at $0.99 — the price goes up on launch day.

— J.P. White