Devil's Trumpet

The prettiest village in the county is about to lose its heart — and one of its own is about to lose his life.

Little Hemlock has fought Thornfield Homes for two years, and now the fight is nearly over. The coroner has freed the Glebe Field, the diggers are coming in spring, and the village has one gesture of defiance left: the biggest bonfire in a hundred years, lit on the very ground the developer means to build on. All of Little Hemlock crowds onto the field this Bonfire Night, torches high, to burn Mr Thornfield in effigy and go down swinging. Their champion is Gideon Larkcom, the campaign's fearless lion. By the time the fire burns low, he lies dead beside it — felled, everyone agrees, by too much cider and the November dark.

Dilys Ashcroft knows better.

Two years a widow and only lately awake to the world again, the retired botanist has rebuilt her life among cuttings and cold frames and a walled garden coming slowly back to life. She has also learned to read what grows — and what should not. When she finds thornapple seeds where currants ought to be, she understands, with a cold certainty, that someone used the bonfire, the crowd, and the crisis over the land as cover for murder.

As the village bays for the developer's blood, Dilys must clear the guilty of the wrong crime, shield an innocent the whole parish is only too eager to blame, and follow a poison to its root — through kitchen gardens and old grudges to a betrayal, and a hidden hand behind Thornfield, that reach far deeper than one field.

Warm, wry, and steeped in the turning of the seasons, Devil's Trumpet is a cosy village mystery with teeth — a story of grief and green things, of communities that close ranks and secrets that will not stay buried.

Because the deadliest thing on Bonfire Night was never the fire.