The Hollow Ascent

In the shadow of iron-grey council estates, Leo Ashford claws his way from a childhood of cold-water flats and rationed meals. When a chance encounter with a compromised mortgage broker offers a path into the gilded world of Belgravia and country manors, Leo seizes it, forging documents to secure a vast loan on a property that was never truly his. As he dances through aristocratic soirees and tastes the power he always craved, the deception that lifted him begins to tighten like a noose. Investigator DCI Imogen Grey, facing her own haunted past, starts peeling back the layers of this audacious fraud. The collision of desperation and hubris sets the stage for a reckoning in the hallowed chambers of the Old Bailey, where the weight of a man’s choices will finally crush him, exposing the savage truth that some ladders can only be climbed once, and the fall breaks everything.