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; none is on sale yet.
The Books
Book 1
The Wrack Line
A guest drowns off one of her hire boats, and the sergeant wants a tidy verdict that will close the business by winter.
Not yet on sale
Book 2
The Oyster Lease
An oyster lease is a small thing to leave behind, and a man is dead over who inherits it. Mina knows the family, serves them breakfast, and will have to go on doing it long after she is finished.
Not yet on sale
Book 3
The Entitlement
A returned man lies dead on the high-water mark, half in one jurisdiction and half in the other, and neither authority wants the work. While two men argue about whose it is, his family waits.
Not yet on sale
Book 4
The Deed
A flood cuts the district off, and when the water goes down a man is dead who had already packed to leave. Everyone who could have reached him was shut inside the flood with him.
Not yet on sale
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