Scarecrow Secrets: A Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery($12.05Value)

Description

She came looking for peace. She found a body staged among the scarecrows. A warm, character-rich village mystery for readers who like their crime cosy, their communities real, and their sleuthing done by an artist's eye rather than a warrant. When former police constable Lucy Harford moors her narrowboat The Curious Cat in the quaint English village of Lower Wick, she's hoping for nothing more than quiet days of painting and a place worth sketching. The annual Scarecrow Festival should be the perfect backdrop — bunting and craft stalls, Morris dancers on the green, and whimsical figures standing sentry in every garden. Then Lucy discovers the vicar's body displayed among them, and the idyllic village she arrived in becomes something far more complicated. Lower Wick is a place where everyone knows everyone else's business — or thinks they do. Beneath the festival cheer lie decades of buried grudges. The vicar, it turns out, had a talent for involving himself in other people's pain. Not everyone is sorry he's gone. Lucy wants no part of an investigation. But her police training won't let her unsee what she's noticed, and her artist's eye keeps catching details others miss. With the help of Emma, a local journalist whose curiosity matches her own, and Sir Meows-a-Lot, a stray ginger cat who has decided that Lucy belongs to him, she begins to trace the connections between grief, guilt, and a community fracturing under the weight of its own secrets. In the cozy world of Lower Wick, the scarecrows aren't the only things keeping watch. Scarecrow Secrets is the first book in the Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery series. Each book works as a standalone mystery, so you can start anywhere — though Lucy's world deepens with every book, and reading in order lets you share the whole of her journey. Scarecrow Secrets began with a walk through a village, near to an English canal, that was mid-festival with scarecrows in every garden, bunting strung between lampposts, and the kind of cheerful community effort that makes you think nothing could possibly go wrong here. Which, of course, is exactly when a mystery writer's mind starts working.   I wanted to write about what lies beneath the surface of places like that. Villages where people genuinely care for each other but also carry grudges they've never quite resolved. Communities where kindness and quiet resentment coexist in the same street, the same family, sometimes the same person.   Lucy Harford arrived almost fully formed, a woman whose police training taught her to observe and whose painting taught her to really see. Putting her on a narrowboat gave her the freedom to arrive somewhere, become part of its life for a while, and then move on. It's a way of living I find deeply interesting, and I think she does too, though she's still working out whether it's a choice or an escape.   Sir Meows-a-Lot was not planned. He simply appeared, as cats do, and refused to leave.   I hope you enjoy your time in Lower Wick. The village is fictional, but the kind of place it is and the kind of secrets it keeps, well that's another matter. Lucy Harford didn't plan on solving murders. She planned on painting them, the villages, not the crimes. But a former police constable's instincts don't switch off just because she's traded a warrant card for a set of watercolours, and when she moors her narrowboat in Lower Wick during the annual Scarecrow Festival, those instincts prove impossible to ignore. Secrets is the first book in the Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mysteries, a series set on England's canal network where each book brings Lucy to a new community and a new crime. These are fair-play mysteries — the clues are there for attentive readers — set in worlds where the investigation reveals not just a killer but the relationships, loyalties, and long-buried grievances that shaped the crime. For readers who enjoy village mysteries with substance: warmth without shallowness, puzzles with emotional weight, and communities you can almost hear through the page. I'm a country parson turned cozy mystery writer. Life has taken me into some unexpected places, with training in therapeutic counselling and mediation. All of it taught me the same thing: people are more complicated than they appear, and the places that look so settled often carry deep fractures. I created Lucy Harford, a former police constable who lives aboard The Curious Cat, her narrowboat on England's canal network. With her ginger cat Sir Meows-a-Lot for company, Lucy travels from community to community, painting watercolours and stumbling into murders that reveal what lies beneath the surface of close-knit communities. Her artist's eye catches what others miss. Her police instincts won't let her look away. The Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mysteries are village mysteries with depth — fair-play puzzles set in communities where grief and grudges coexist with warmth and wit, and where the investigation uncovers not just a killer but the hum