In the hills above Orsano, an ancient castle broods over a gorge and holds its family like a prison, and when a countess summons the Belgian Detective in secret, a stone shatters a window with a dagger-drawn warning that “honour” will be kept in blood; as a forbidden meeting on an upper gallery ends in a violent fall and a “woman in black” vanishes into shadowed passages, the investigation turns from spectacle to paperwork—missing dispatch books, a surgically removed page, and ash in a grate that points to inheritance, legitimacy, and a marriage treated like a treaty; inspired by historical crime of its era while remaining entirely fictional, The Woman in Black is an original Golden Age–style mystery about tyranny disguised as tradition, the ruinous cost of secrecy, and the moment a household chooses violence to keep its silence.