The Hand on the Flyleaf

Some books remember the hands that held them. Loveday Pengelly remembers them too.

For sixty-eight years she has lived in the steep Cornish book-town of Porthmellin, and for forty of them she taught its children their letters — every careful loop, every pressed-too-hard pencil stroke, every proud full stop. She forgets names. She never forgets a hand. Now, widowed and quietly managing, she keeps The Foxed Page, a cluttered seaside bookshop that smells of paper and paraffin and the sweet brown bloom of old pages, with the help of a dignified tuxedo tom named Sergeant Cuff — a cat who is seldom wrong about a person, and who gives no reasons.

When a tea-chest of clearance books from the shuttered Subscription Library yields a first edition inscribed forty years ago by two people she knew, an old unease stirs beneath the town's tidy pride. Days later, on the eve of the Bookweek festival, the celebrated Dame Rosamund Frayne comes home at last — the girl who left in 1986 and became the world — hinting to her old teacher that she means to set a long-buried record straight. By dawn Dame Rosamund lies at the foot of the Long Stairs, and the inscribed book is gone from its locked case.

Everyone calls it a tragic accident. Loveday knows better.

Armed with foxed pages and pencilled provenance, a forged note in a hand almost but not quite a friend's, and one cat's unerring dislike of the wrong man, she follows the marginalia toward an old theft, a silenced confession, and a truth she has kept to herself for four decades.

Told in Loveday's dry, watchful, unforgettable voice — the voice of a woman who has learned how useful it is to be underestimated — The Hand on the Flyleaf is a cosy village mystery with teeth, steeped in sea-fret, granite, and the secrets that come to old pages like freckles to a fair skin.

Some hands, once read, cannot be forgotten. Some cannot be forgiven.