Two hundred years after milkmaid Margaret Williams is murdered in the tiny village of St. Catwg, a new young couple move into Gellia Farm, where Margaret lived with her employers, the Richards family. They are disturbed by the headstone of a grave in the local churchyard, a stone which directly faces their home – the Murder Stone. Margaret’s grave. The couple know very little about what happened to the young woman, reputed throughout the legends surrounding the Murder Stone, to be pregnant. What happened to her and who was responsible remained a mystery. The previous owners of Gellia Farm, unfamiliar with the local legends that ran through the village, didn’t know of the rumours steeped in history, of romance, broken promises, lies and, of course, murder.

But who was responsible for Margaret’s death, two centuries ago, and why do stories abound of her haunting the graveyard and the pathway where she was found, strangled? Is she seeking revenge or is she looking to tell her story? A story that echoes through the centuries from 1823 to the present day, where women’s safety is still not a priority. Margaret Williams became a victim of someone else’s vengeance for simply wanting a better life for herself – a life that ended in the mystery of her unresolved murder. How many more will meet the same fate?

The Murder Stone is author Emma Hardy’s debut novel and cleverly weaves a true story – of Margaret William’s untimely death – with fiction, and her own interpretation of the events that took place in St. Catwg over two hundred years ago. Emma merges fact and fiction into an intriguing tale of a woman walking home and never arriving – a story we hear repeatedly in modern times. The book details the innocence of that last walk home, a last walk that so many other women have made in their own hometown, where they thought they were safe, where they thought their life was just ahead of them, yet never got to turn the key in the door.