A Harvest of Nightshade

The countryside in autumn is the great liar of the year. It lays out the loveliest table — hedgerows heavy with sloe and damson, the old orchard groaning with apples, the whole village gathered for Apple Day and the Harvest Supper — and it salts three of the dishes with death, and smiles, and lets you choose.

Dilys Ashcroft, sixty-four and forty years a botanist, knows the difference. She has spent fifteen months learning to live inside her grief, keeping a single amber light burning in her late husband's greenhouse so the house should not be entirely dark on his side of it. Now, gently bullied by her friend Miriam, she has finally thrown open that greenhouse door to the neighbours — one day only, doors shut again at dusk. It should have been the bravest thing she did all season.

Then Silas Crabbe dies at the Harvest Supper.

The cantankerous old orchardman — feuding with a housebuilder, tormenting his debt-ridden great-nephew, threatening to tie up his beloved orchard so tight in his will that the lawyers would weep — goes down flushed and wild-eyed and laughing over a glass of his own celebrated damson wine. The village agrees, comfortably, that the old soak simply overdid it.

Dilys knows better. She has seen deadly nightshade growing on the ruined ground above the lane, hanging its sweet black lamps beside the harmless sloe on the very same hedge. She knows those glossy berries were picked, deliberately, and dropped into a dead man's cup.

And she knows something else, something that frightens her more than any amount of grief: that a part of her comes alive in the presence of a death, and likes it.

To catch a poisoner the whole village loves — again — she must read one last, terrible harvest before it is gathered in.

Wry, tender, and quietly deadly, A Harvest of Nightshade is a cosy village mystery with roots that run deep and dark. Come in. The doors shut at dusk.