Explore our Cosy Murder Mystery Series
Cosy mysteries set in unforgettable landscapes and crafted by a small independent press
Two Series. One Invitation.
Whether you prefer mist-covered roads or windswept coastlines, each series offers a different kind of escape, and a mystery that unfolds one careful step at a time.
The Lighthouse Inn Series
Author: Julia Martin
Ms Martin’s series is set in Thorn Point on the rugged Cornish coast, long the habitat of Celts with their strange language and even stranger customs. The Lighthouse Inn, set at the end of Thorn Point, is left to Maris Thorn by her late grandmother and she ends an 18-year-academic career as a doctor of marine biology to return home and busy herself with the day-to-day cares of running a six-room lodge.
Here we meet seventy-year-old chef Hettie Nancarrow, with her plain-speaking attitude and her Cornish proverbs, Wreck, Maris’s three-legged greyhound and Detective-Sergeant Callum Pryce, recently transferred from Cardiff to Truro, and placed in charge of the investigation in the first book in the series, “Dead in the Water”.
He is still an active participant in the second book, “The Tide Brings No Mercy”, although unable to reach Thorn Point when the weather turns foul. And also making a second appearance is Fenella Imogen Grace Penhaligon (“Fig”for short), the precocious teenager who lives around the corner and has amazing abilities in the world of computing, coding and hacking.
Will they all be there in the third book? Not even the publisher knows (although I, for one, fervently hope so).
Dead in the Water
A Lighthouse Inn Series (Book 1)
A remote lighthouse. A storm rolling in.
And a dinner party where every guest has a reason to kill.
When Maris Thorn returns to Thorn Point to take over her grandmother’s lighthouse lodge, she expects a quiet new beginning. Instead, she finds herself hosting a group of guests bound together by something darker than coincidence.
By morning, one of them is dead.
With the storm closing in and no one able to leave, the truth must lie somewhere within the walls of the inn, and Maris is determined to find it.
Ebook: Available on Amazon
Paperback: Coming soon
The Tide Brings No Mercy
A Lighthouse Inn Series (Book 2)
A locked room. A winter storm. Five suspects. No way out.
When a named storm cuts Thorn Point off from the mainland, the guests of the Lighthouse Inn find themselves marooned for three days with no signal, no road, and no way to leave. By the third morning, one of them is dead — found locked inside the old lighthouse lamp room, from the inside, with no apparent means of exit.
Maris Thorn, former marine biologist and reluctant innkeeper, has spent her career learning to observe without disturbing. Now, with Detective Sergeant Callum Pryce stranded a hundred miles away in Truro and the storm showing no sign of breaking, she is the only person standing between five frightened guests and whatever is hiding among them.
E-book: Available on Amazon
Paperback: Coming soon
Supper at Storm's End
A Lighthouse Inn Series (Book 3)
When a film production arrives at the Lighthouse Inn at Thorn Point, Maris Trevenna expects the usual disruption of strangers in her kitchen. What she doesn’t expect is Patrick Calloway, a journalist who has been investigating the same shipping company for thirty years, or Cressida Lane, who is carrying something in her jacket lining that she won’t name.
Set against the Cornish coast in autumn, Supper at Storm’s End is a mystery told through a supper club, a lighthouse logbook, and the patient accumulation of things that careful people keep. A fishing boat that went down in a storm in 1987. A harbourmaster who was on it and came off before it turned. A coastguard station that didn’t answer. And Rosalind Trevenna, who saw everything from the lamp room and wrote it down in the same hand she used for the weather.
Some records wait thirty years to reach the right person. This one has been waiting for Maris.
E-book: Available on Amazon
Paperback: Coming soon
The Haunted Highway Mysteries Series
Author: Jonathan Hartley & Don Halliday
This series is set in the hills and valleys of the KwaZulu-Natal area of South Africa known locally as “The Midlands”. Mr Hartley was born there, went to school there and knows the area like the back of his proverbial hand.
The old main road from Durban to Johannesburg runs through the area, and it is the stretch from Trekkersburg (Pietermaritzburg) to Zand River (Mooi River) that forms the backdrop for the Haunted Highway series.
Once a bustling route filled with cars and trucks on their way from what was Africa’s busiest port to its wealthiest city, the R103 is now an almost abandoned stretch of twisty bends and varied gradients, linking a strange collection of places. There are small towns like Aloe Falls and Zand River, villages like Hilltop and Hampton Road, posh single-sex boarding schools like St Agnes and All Saints and an old country hotel called Dawson’s.
It is an area where the ghosts of past inhabitants – whether they were rough-neck traders or god-fearing missionaries, Zulu chiefs or gentleman farmers – mingle with their present-day equivalents, especially in the misty summer months around the end of the year.
The series is centred on artisanal baker Annie Lomax, who drives the road in her van, The Rolling Scone, and her adorable Jack Russell terrier, Crumpet. She is aided in her amateur sleuthing by an odd collection of friends – Priya Naidoo, who owns the local bookstore “Books & Brews”, former hospital administrator Lindiwe Khumalo and garage owner Jacques “Jakes”van der Merwe.
As you can see from the map on this page, the R103 plots a winding path through the Midlands, an area that lies between the mountains and the sea – between the warmth of the Indian Ocean and the cold of the Drakensberg, between sea level and 11 424ft (3 482m) above it. Not surprising, then, that this is an area of contrasts.
And fertile ground for what the Zulus call izindiki, restless spirits who cannot settle because of the violent or otherwise unnatural manner of their deaths.
Murder at Misty Ridge
A Haunted Highway Mystery (Book 1)
A quiet road. A close-knit community.
And a death no one wants to question too closely.
When the body of a man is found near Misty Ridge, the explanation is simple…and quickly accepted. But for Annie, something doesn’t sit right. The details don’t add up, and the deeper she looks, the more she realises that this is a place where everyone knows more than they are willing to say.
In a community built on long memory and quiet understanding, uncovering the truth may come at a cost.
E-book: Available on Amazon
Paperback: Coming soon
Murder at Marberg Dam
A Haunted Highway Mystery (Book 2)
When former Olympic middle-distance runner Matt Renshaw is found dead near Marberg Dam, the police move quickly toward a simple explanation.
Too quickly.
Annie, Priya and Lindiwe are not convinced. What begins as a tragic accident soon reveals a tangled web of rivalry, ambition and hidden power stretching from elite schools to university canoe clubs and deep into the hills surrounding Trekkersburg.
Renshaw had recently returned from the United States and was preparing for the legendary Dusi Canoe Marathon with a new paddling partner.
E-book: Available on Amazon
Paperback: Coming soon
The Silent Station
A Haunted Highway Mystery (Book 3)
Some places should be left alone.
When Priya Naidoo takes her parents out for Sunday lunch at a country restaurant, getting lost on the way seems like nothing more than an irritating detour.
Then they find the abandoned forestry station.
The buildings should have been stripped years ago. Yet the windows are intact, the doors are still hanging, and fresh vehicle tracks cut through the mud.
Her father’s hearing aid begins to crackle with unexplained interference.
And when a friendly waitress at the restaurant hears where they have been, her reaction is immediate.
“Hau, you didn’t go there?”
The locals call the place the Place of Angry Spirits.
E-book: Available on Amazon