The Kissing Bough

Snow falls straight and steady down the valley, and everyone in Little Hemlock knows what that kind of snow means: it means business with the whole village. By Twelfth Night the road to Kingsbourne is buried, the wassail cider is spiced and steaming, and the old kissing bough turns slowly over the door of the Green Man, its white berries catching the lamplight like glass beads a child might want to string. It is pretty. It is Christmas. It means nothing at all.

By morning a woman lies dead beneath the oldest apple tree in the manor orchard, and the village settles, comfortably, on a comfortable answer: poor Rosamund Sharrow had too much cider and lost her way in the cold. Dilys Ashcroft knows better. Forty years a botanist have taught her exactly what those waxen white berries do to a human heart — and taught her, too, to distrust a death that arrives so conveniently, on the very night a sharp-tongued outsider swore she had found something in the old estate deeds that would win the village its fight against the developers.

For the bones the summer turned up on the water-meadow, the man who has circled that wet ground for years, and the stranger dead in the snow are not three stories but one. And the hand behind them has been here all along — beloved, unremarkable, entirely unsuspected.

Cut off by the drifts, with only a young detective and a dry, prickly pathologist beside her, Dilys must read a murder forty winters in the making before the thaw arrives and lets a killer bury the truth for good.

Warm, wry, and quietly devastating, The Kissing Bough is a classic English village mystery for readers who love their crime with woodsmoke, snowdrops, and secrets that keep. Old Amos Kestle still tells the fire that Micky Endicott never sent that postcard from Canada. Somebody in Little Hemlock has been counting on nobody listening.