A Bitter Harvest

The tide you come home on tells you who you'll be all day — and the morning Hedley Vercoe died, Porthgowan's came in gold.

Two autumns into rescuing her grandmother's Cornish bakehouse, Robyn Meade has finally stopped bracing for disaster. The cloam oven is warm, the trade is good, her apple cake has become the sort of signature bake that puts down roots, and Sam Trerise — coxswain, boatbuilder, the slowest and surest man she's ever known — has become a great deal more than an old friend. For the first time in her life, Robyn feels safe. It is not a feeling she recommends. It makes you careless about the tide.

Then the Cider and Smugglers Weekend rolls in on the October swell, and with it Hedley Vercoe: cider magnate, self-crowned Cap'n of the reenactment, and the loudest man in three parishes. When Hedley broaches the keg and drinks the smuggler-captain's ceremonial health, he dies on the cliff path minutes later — as though the eighteenth century had reached up and taken him.

The village calls it a drunkard's misadventure. But Robyn, who can smell bitter almonds where everyone else smells only scrumpy, knows a poisoner's hand when she tastes one. And she knows too that the answer lies buried in Porthgowan's smuggling past — in a village that dines out on one glorious night in the 1780s while keeping quieter about the deaths that came after.

To find a killer, Robyn must dig into a drowned grudge the whole parish would rather leave under the water — even the gentlest men among them, even the neighbours she has only just let herself love. And on this coast, some secrets have been kept for three hundred years for a reason.

Warm, wry, and steeped in woodsmoke, windfall apples, and salt air, A Bitter Harvest is a cozy mystery with real teeth. Pour yourself something cidery. Just mind who broaches the keg.