Petra Solm

Petra Solm writes literary mysteries set in the places where the past refuses to stay quiet — old cities, layered streets, buildings that have been keeping secrets longer than anyone now living has been asking questions.

Her debut novel, The Map That Remembered — the first book in the What the Stones Remember series — is set in Valencia's medieval El Carmen neighbourhood, where a former writer discovers she can read the emotional memory of old maps by touch, and finds herself drawn into a four-hundred-year-old erasure that someone in the present is still killing to protect.

Petra's fiction sits at the edge where careful historical research meets the quietly supernatural — where the warmth of a close-knit community and the pleasure of a well-constructed puzzle share space with the persistent sense that old stone holds more than we know how to ask for.

Readers who find their way to her books tend to stay.