The Knot-Wife Mysteries

A tidal island. A dead man in a gale nobody forecast. And a knot-wife who swore she’d never tie another knot.

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.

On Wreckers’ Night the Holm lights lanterns along the cliffs for the Constance, driven onto the rocks two hundred years ago by a wind the island has blamed on a knot-wife ever since. This year a treasure diver who swore he’d found her bell is found in the smugglers’ tunnels under Wrack Cove, a lantern in his hand and a four-knotted cord in his pocket that ought to be at the bottom of the sea. Stella has a museum full of doubtful relics to sort through, a lifeboat coxswain she has started looking for on the quay, and a mother who walked out fifteen years ago and has just walked back in with a suitcase and no explanations. And in her grandmother’s ledger she finds the entry she has dreaded all her life: the wind-cord sold for Tom Angove’s boat the week he drowned, tied by her own hands.

The Long Night of Lamps is the Holm’s midwinter: a lantern on every sill, a true lover’s knot on the harbour lamp for every couple brave enough to hang one, and this year a three-day storm that shuts the causeway and leaves nobody able to leave. Then the folklorist Anthony Marrable is found dead in the museum archive among Thirza Curnow’s papers, and all over the island old keeping-knots, the ones people bought to keep a secret, start coming undone by themselves. Everyone has something Anthony had read about. Stella has more than most: in his notes is proof that the cord that drowned Tom Angove was never her knot, and a hint about whose it might have been that she cannot bear to say aloud. Least of all to Clem, on the night he finally kisses her.

Fog has sat on the Holm for nine days, the tides come in hours wrong, and the causeway floods without warning. When the engineer sent from the mainland to condemn it is found drowned at the halfway post, tied by the ankle with the one knot no knot-wife will tie, the island has its witch and the Bridge Company has its excuse. Stella can feel that the knot was copied from a drawing by someone who didn’t believe in it, but nobody wants to hear that from the knot-wife whose own secret has just come out. Clem knows now what she kept from him about Tom, and he has stopped coming to the chandlery. To clear the island’s name, Stella will have to ask her mother the question she has been afraid of for fifteen years, and the answer will lead her to a door she has knocked on all her life.

Once in nineteen years the moon brings the highest tide Merrow Holm ever sees, and this Midsummer it comes with no one holding the Fourth Knot, the cord a Curnow knot-wife tied three hundred years ago to keep the sea from taking the island. On the eve of the king tide a stranger who claimed the knot by right of Rescorla blood is found dead in the lamp room of the Holm Light, the cord is gone from its stone, and Hester Rescorla, who Stella now knows tied the knot that drowned Tom Angove, is under arrest for a murder Stella is almost sure she didn’t commit. With the sea climbing the harbour steps, Stella has one tide to find the cord, the killer and the truth, and to learn what her grandmother meant: a knot holds what you feel, not what you mean, and some knots take more than one pair of hands.