In Auremark, the murdered do not lie.

A body dead by another's hand can be compelled to answer three questions, once, truthfully, and only a consecrated sister of the House of Last Light can wake it. Upon that single certainty the whole realm has built its justice.

For thirty years, Confessor Minoe Caul has knelt beside the murdered and paid them the truest thing she owns in exchange for their final testimony. Then she is called to a locked room where a murdered woman will not answer at all. The dead woman's three truths have already been drawn out of her and stolen, by a hand that should not exist, and folded into a hollow in the wall is her daughter: a silent child of six who hears the dead as easily as breathing.

To keep the girl, Minoe must follow a trail of emptied graves out of the city and into the black marsh country, a skeptical crown's Serjeant at her side and a patient, unhurried man walking the roads ahead of her. Because the child is what he has come to collect. And the one truth the whole world leans upon is about to be proven a lie.

A Light Left Burning is the first novel of Three Confessions, a dark, literary fantasy mystery about those who pay for what they take, and those who never will.