Williamina Tait came back to Sussex Inlet in 1946 to keep The Noust going: a guest house whose dining room is half converted and stuck for want of timber, a boatshed, a hire book, and a father who did not come back from the sea in 1944. Probate is pending. She runs the lot and owns none of it, and everyone at the inlet knows it.
Each book is a fair-play whodunnit, solvable from the page, and the instruments are the tide, the weather and the bar at the mouth: here an alibi is a tide table. The deaths are plain and never staged, and the cost of an answer is that she goes on living next to it. Warm and spare, for readers of Ann Cleeves and AJ Pearce. Four books, written in order.
The Books
Book 1
The Wrack Line
A guest goes out walking after his dinner and does not come back for his tea. At first light he is on the sand below the point, one side of him soaked through and the other dry as washing.
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Book 2
The Oyster Lease
Thirty yards out in the water, a shack with the stove cold and the blankets folded to come back to. The lease has run in one name since 1908, and Jem Penhale is out in the third row.
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Book 3
The Entitlement
Nobody is arguing about who killed the man on the north-east bank. They are arguing about who is allowed to go across and look, where he lies across the line the water makes, head on the dry side.
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Book 4
The Deed
Brown water comes down the top end on the Saturday, and by Tuesday the road is over at the second cutting. A loaded truck stands on the flat, and every soul in the district is shut in together.
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