Slack Water

A race against the tide. A favourite who never reaches the finish. And a door tied shut from the outside, in the middle of the sea.

Two months after she came home to bury her grandmother, Stella Curnow has reopened Curnow’s Chandlery & Knots on the tidal island of Merrow Holm, and is learning, slowly, to read the feelings people tie into rope. Midsummer brings the Causeway Race: two miles of wet cobbles from the mainland, run against the turning tide, with the lifeboat standing by to fish out the slow.

This year the favourite, golden, debt-ridden Lewis Garrow, pulls up halfway with a cramp and climbs into the Refuge, the hut on stilts where the tide’s latecomers wait it out. When the sea goes down five hours later, the Refuge door is tied shut from the outside with a knot that should never have held, and Lewis is dead on the floor. Nobody could have walked out to him and no boat could have reached him, so the island does its sum, and it comes out every time at the jilted race steward who keeps the tide board.

Stella’s reading of the knot says greed and haste, and the sergeant has written it down. Now she has to find out who else wanted Lewis gone, with a charming folklorist asking questions about knot-wives, a lifeboat coxswain she spends one very cold night beside, and old Jory Kitto insisting the tide hasn’t come on time since her grandmother died.

Because the Holm is slipping. And the printed tables don’t know it yet.

Slack Water is the second Knot-Wife Mystery: a cozy mystery with a touch of seaside magic, a slow-burn romance, an island full of neighbours who know everyone’s business, and a jackdaw who talks in a dead woman’s voice. No gore, no explicit scenes, and the killer is caught by the last page.