Salt of the Wound

A man can't fall drunk into a dry harbour. And when the tide runs out twice a day, the whole of Porthgowan knows it — which is exactly why nobody wants to say so.

Autumn has come to the little Cornish fishing village, and with it the Feast of the Nets: the bunting strung the length of the quay, the blessing of the boats, the smell of hevva cake warm along the harbour wall. It should be the weekend that saves Robyn Meade. Her late grandmother's bakehouse is one leaking roof from ruin, the bank letter she hasn't dared open sits waiting like a stone in her shoe, and three gold festival days might just buy her another winter — if she bakes cleverly and doesn't sleep.

But Porthgowan has a bigger fear than a wet ceiling. Marcus Ferris, the smooth incomer in the good coat, has spent a year quietly buying up the fleet's fishing licences and squeezing the little boats toward extinction. So when Ferris is hauled from the mud on Feast morning, drowned and reeking of drink, most of the village calls it rough justice and the sea taking its own. The coroner calls it a tragic accident.

Robyn knows better. She knows what the dead man ate, and when. She knows a body doesn't drown in an empty basin — and that Ferris ended up a long way from the tide that supposedly took him. Proving it means turning suspicion on a whole grieving fleet she's come to love, on an old flame of Sam Trerise's newly returned to the village, and on the one soul in Porthgowan nobody could ever believe capable of murder.

Warm, wry, and steeped in salt, larch shavings, and the rhythm of the turning tide, Salt of the Wound is a cozy mystery for readers who like their crimes clever, their villages full of secrets, and their heroines armed with nothing sharper than a sound understanding of when the harbour has a floor and when it has a face.

The tide is coming in. So is the truth.