The Longest Night

A baker can read a fire the way another woman reads a face. And this one is lying.

Robyn Meade came home to Porthgowan for the worst of reasons and stayed for the best: a crumbling Cornish bakehouse, a cloam oven that sings when the heat comes right through the clay, and a village that fed her back to life after London nearly finished her. She meant to settle her grandmother's affairs and go. Somewhere in her first grey winter, the going quietly took itself off the list.

Then comes the Longest Night — the solstice storm-feast of lantern light and stargazy pie, when Porthgowan gathers in the chapel to count its storm-dead and hold a candle up against the year's deepest dark. But an easterly backs in off the cold heart of the continent, and snow — the kind this coast sees once in ten years — closes the moor road, kills the power, and cuts the village off from the world.

By morning Merrick Roscarrock is dead in the bolted vestry: churchwarden, heritage grandee, keeper of the village's memory, found beside a cold stove and guttered candles. A tragic accident, everyone agrees — a bad flue, a hard storm, an old man dozing by a failing fire.

But Robyn tends a wood-fired oven for a living. She knows to the minute how a fire draws and burns and gives off its gases, and this hearth is telling a different story than the one the village wants to believe. Snowbound with a sceptical detective, a secret twenty-five winters deep, and a killer who is warming their hands somewhere among the lanterns, she must read the truth in the ashes before the thaw comes and lets a murderer walk free.

Warm as a lit window, sharp as an easterly wind, and steeped in salt, granite, and Cornish folklore, The Longest Night is a cosy mystery to curl up with while the storm howls outside. Bank the fire. Light your lantern. Some stories only surface on the darkest night of the year.