What the Tide Brought In

The barometer in the bakehouse has walked clean off the end of the dial, past the last word any sensible weather should ever reach — and in Porthgowan, you read a Cornish winter off the faces on the quay before you ever look at the glass. The wildest storm in living memory is three days out and coming, and when it finally scours the sand off Gullrock, it gives up a secret the village drowned sixty years ago: the ribs of a lost boat, a set of human bones, and a name nobody has dared say aloud since 1961.

Robyn Meade has trouble enough without the dead. Her bakehouse roof is failing, February is the lean bone of the year, and she's got trays of dark treacle-and-ginger wreckers' cake to bake for the frozen lifeboat crew before the sea calls them out. But when the sharp-tongued wreck-diver who came chasing that old boat is found dead on the tideline, the whole village is content to call it the sea's own doing — and Robyn knows better. The sea did not drown Morwenna Kitto.

The trouble is, the truth about that lost wreck runs straight through Robyn's own family: through the grandmother who held this roof up with grit and secrets, and the father who left and never told anyone why. Someone in Porthgowan has kept a name buried under the sand for sixty years. Someone will kill again to keep it there.

Told in a warm, wry, salt-sharp voice, steeped in oak-smoke and brine and the deep sweet reek of treacle gone into the stone, What the Tide Brought In is a Cornish cozy mystery for anyone who loves a close-knit village, a determined amateur sleuth, and a coast that has never once been sentimental about the sea.

Light the oven. Bar the door. The tide is turning, and it isn't finished bringing things in.