Rise and Fall

There are tides that take you out and tides that bring you in — and in Porthgowan, this Easter, something is quietly turning against the whole village.

Robyn Meade has spent ten months on a making tide, coaxing her grandmother's bakehouse back to life one batch of saffron hot cross buns at a time. She's got an apprentice who's outgrowing her, a coded notebook full of a dead woman's secrets, and the unspoken beginnings of something with Sam Trerise, the lifeboat coxswain she keeps taking the long way round to see. For the first time in a decade of kitchens that ate their own, she's letting herself feel safe.

Then the whole village turns out for the RNLI open day, and at the height of the cliff-rescue demonstration, a visiting safety inspector goes over the fifty-foot edge in front of the crowd. Tragic accident, the verdict all but writes itself: the old rail simply gave way.

But Robyn knows rust. She knows the difference between corrosion the sea took forty years to make and corrosion made in a bucket overnight — and she knows a fitting that fails under a man's weight didn't fail by chance. Someone has been quietly hollowing out the very things Porthgowan trusts to keep it safe: the ladders, the rigging, the rails a man hangs his whole life on at three in the morning with the tide running. Frighten a person about the ground beneath their feet, and you can sell them a floor.

There's a glossy development on the headland, a petition splitting the fishing families, and a truth that reaches all the way to the harbour mouth — and to the man Robyn loves. She has one falling tide to prove what she's seen before the water rises again.

Warm, salt-sharp, and steeped in gorse, saffron, and Cornish grit, Rise and Fall is a cozy mystery about the things — and the people — we trust to hold. Some of them shouldn't be trusted at all.