Before the Poison by Peter Robinson

A widower, Chris Lowndes, returns to his native England after a successful career in Hollywood as a composer of background music for movies. Upon his wife's death, he decided to return to Yorkshire to write a composition to honor his wife's memory. He buys Kilnsgate House, an old mansion deep in the isolated Yorkshire countryside, only viewing it online and relying on his real estate agent to preview the property for him.

Chris finds the house charming, but has a vague sense that the house has been waiting for him as he sees or feels ghostly presences as he tours his home. He conducts inquiries and finds that the house was the scene of a murder in the 1950's. The home's owner, a prominent doctor, was poisoned by his much-younger wife and she was hung for the crime.

More intriguing is that he grew up not far from this house and was about 3 years old when incident happened but finds himself having dreams and memories of the events. 

Chris begins to delve into the background of this tragic event to determine what really happened. His curiosity quickly becomes an obsession to determine if the death of Dr. Fox was really a murder committed by his wife, Grace, or a natural death. As Chris delves deeper into the mystery, he conducts inquiries with locals who knew the Fox family, and searches through archives to find out what really happened. The more he reads and researches this tragedy, the more convinced he is that Grace was innocent and only declared guilty because she was having an affair with a much-younger man.

I found this story fascinating as it was almost a ghost story but more of a historical mystery as the story goes between Chris's time and his imagining the story based on Grace's diary - he discovered while looking through a desk.  This is a quite story of one person's self discovery as well as trying to solve a mystery from his childhood.  From my reading this is a stand-alone and not part of the Inspector Banks series.