From the publisher's desk

When I look out of the window of my new home office, I realize how lucky I am to be able to live in the country. A patch of lawn, the edge of a flowerbed and a couple of mature trees fill the foreground, and, behind the undulating farmland, a patch of woodland, more like forest, really, reaches up to a cloudy sky

It is many miles away from the city where we both used to work, but it feels even further removed than that, as though our years there were from a different lifetime. This feeling is even stronger on our daily walks, when we are more likely to be run over by a tractor (or some other mechanised farm implement) than by a car, more likely in the mornings to be greeted by a burst of birdsong than the shrill demands of a bedside alarm.

It is, of course, not entirely utopian. The roads are narrow and pot-holed and the local shop insufficient for even our modest needs. And when the day begrudgingly gives way to the night, the stars may be bright but on a cloudy night – and there are many – the darkness is truly black.

Which gives rise to a consideration of what our ancestors would have called “the spirits of the night”. Ours is not an ancient house, so we are shorn of the creaking floorboards and ill-fitting windows that populate most ghost stories, but when the rains come, the wind often howls through our trees in true horror-film fashion.

Recent advances in technology have gutted the cinema industry, amongst many others, so there is no longer any need – or, indeed, any realistic chance – for us to go out at night if we wish to be entertained by Hollywood’s finest. And, yet at the touch of a button, here at home, we can summon up all of our favourite wide-screen villains, everyone from Tony Perkins to Bette Davis.

Which is probably why we have felt drawn to concentrate our publishing efforts – at least initially – on authors in the genre best known as “cosy mysteries”. We think we have unearthed two potential stars in Julia Martin and Jonathan Hartley and they have rewarded us with two stories so good – with characters so well-rounded and plots so twisted and reveals so surprising –  that we have insisted they develop these initial books into full-blown series.

First up is Julia’s “Dead in the Water”, set in a lighthouse lodge on the storm-battered Cornish coast and featuring a divorced marine biologist and her three-legged greyhound called, appropriately, Wreck.

By contrast, Jonathan’s “Murder at Misty Ridge” is set half the world away in the rolling hills of the “Natal Midlands” in South Africa, and features an adorable Jack Russell terrier named Crumpet, who luckily has all four of his very short legs.

My male ego has had to suffer the fact that both books have female protagonists, but Tania assures me this has nothing to do with her insistent claim that women are just more attuned to the world than men are.

Oh well, at least both the dogs are male.

Richard Lyon

March 2026