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In March 2030, at an observatory in Ladakh owned by a Luxembourg investment house, Dr Asha Varghese is clearing a queue of low-priority anomalies with a mug of tea going cold. One of them does not repeat at any interval that means anything.

Five months later a proxy of the Lasan Alliance speaks in a boardroom in Kirchberg. It is not a person, it has no name, and it has watched humanity for eleven weeks. It says our species identifies problems reliably, agrees they exist, solves them excellently and executes at scale - and fails at one thing only, which is acting when the acting is expensive to whoever decides.

Then it gives the condition, in ninety-one words, and tells the company to publish it within thirty days.

The company does not publish it. Nobody decides not to. It goes onto an agenda as item seven with fifteen minutes allocated.

This is the story of how the largest fact in human history was mislaid by careful people following excellent procedures - and of the four scientists on a plain at four and a half thousand metres who found it, one of whom is dead by the twelfth of July over the custody of a hard drive.

Told forty years later by the woman who read it. There is no villain anywhere in it, and that is the point.

The aliens arrive, deliver their terms, and go away for seven years. This is a novel about institutions, written as a memoir - about what eight billion people did with a message once they finally had it, and why nobody could be blamed for the six months in which they did not.

Book One of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

At 06:00 on the nineteenth of May 2031, every device on Earth capable of presenting words to a human being does so at once - telephones, departure boards, hearing aids, the audio systems of four hundred and eleven aircraft in cruise, and a two-hundred-rupee alarm clock in a rented room in Bengaluru.

It speaks for eleven minutes. It damages nothing. It touches no weapon and no operating theatre. It names the company, it names the date, and then it says ten words that break the world open:

This proxy does not know why you were not told.

The first four hours are quiet. People go and find somebody to be with. The disorder comes later.

Asha Varghese has been unemployed for five months and is being sued by her former employer. She has sixty-one pages of method under a mattress - not a claim, a procedure, the one document in the world that lets a stranger with a telescope find the thing for themselves. She has been carrying it since December because she is frightened.

A novel about disclosure: what it costs to be the person who says the true thing, and why an accurate allegation on a public record can end a life without anybody lying.

The Lasan Alliance says nothing at all for the next seven years. There is no fleet in this book and no battle. There is a legal opinion of sixty-four pages that is entirely correct and completely destructive, an inquiry that takes ten years, and a species that has finally been told the truth and discovers within seven months that being told the truth is not the same as being able to do anything about it.

Book Two of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

The condition requires one government, one currency and a demonstrable equality. There are two hundred and six sovereign states, and every one of them is the best thing some group of people managed to build out of a catastrophe.

Asha Varghese argues for speed, because delay has victims and the victims are the poorest. Idris Oyelaran - a constitutional lawyer from Ibadan, and the finest opponent she will ever have - argues that a species should not make an irreversible change on the first attempt, quickly, on the promise of a gift, from a giver who has said it will not be there afterwards.

Both of them are right. There is no fact in the world that decides between them.

In the first week of March 2033, three secretariats book venues in Lagos in the same district, because the dates were free. What happens next is not caused by anybody. A banner on a footbridge, a fuel stall, a generator, and a hydrant network at a fifth of its nominal pressure - and four hundred and forty of the best hydrologists in the world in a hotel four kilometres away with a map of the district, every one of whom knows exactly what to do and none of whom has any authority to do it.

The middle book of the series and the one that turns it. A disaster that nobody caused, an inquiry that finds nobody responsible, and the reason that finding is the most important thing in its report.

No aliens appear in this book. They said their piece in 2031 and went away. What replaces them is a duty roster on a wall in Rotterdam with eleven telephone numbers on it - the first body in human history that can both see a problem whole and act on it, built by municipal engineers who had no position on any of this and simply wanted the water to be able to cross a boundary.

Book Three of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

By 2035 the instruments work. Water crosses boundaries, ports clear cargo in a common unit, a famine gets a derogation. What does not exist is a government - because a hundred specific authorities are not one authority, and the thing that decides when two of them disagree has to be written down.

The moment it is written down, two hundred and six states have something to refuse.

Asha Varghese writes article 11 in a hotel room in Montevideo in four hours: a definition of sovereignty that can be falsified, with a fourth limb that tests observed conduct rather than powers. It is the only thing she will ever write that outlives her. Nobody proposes a single word of change to it.

They attack the commencement provision instead - three lines of machinery nobody had thought about for more than an hour.

Every argument for delay is technically correct. Every person making it is honest. And because Asha annexed the nine equality measures to article 11 for reasons of drafting elegance, the measures go where the article goes: to the eleventh year.

So she does the only thing left. She makes the constitution state its own price - an appendix, four columns and eight rows, with the last column headed attributable to the transition schedule. It goes through without a vote against, and she does not understand why for years.

A novel about how good documents die, what happens to a person who spends four hundred days in a room with decent people, and the difference between deciding a thing and being unable to say when you decided it.

Still no fleet, still no battle. A drafting committee, a reading group in Kochi that finds the flaw four months before the professionals, a Norwegian negotiator who spends her career on eighteen months of schedule, and a table of numbers that somebody has to read aloud once a year for eleven years.

Book Four of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

In June 2038 the count is seventy-one states for and a hundred and four needed, and the modelling says 2047. Everybody supports the instrument. Nobody wants to be among the first to sign an agreement they can never leave.

At 04:11 on Friday the thirteenth of August, eleven observatories on the night side of the Earth record the same thing at the same moment.

The Aperture proved they can be invisible. This is a decision.

Asha Varghese spends the following eleven weeks arguing, in public and increasingly alone, that the species must not adopt its constitution because a fleet is coming - that we would be passing the examination by cheating on the only question ever asked. She loses the argument comprehensively. She is also right, and the arithmetic is in the register, and she has never stopped believing both.

It passes on the eleventh of October 2038 by fifty-one per cent to forty-nine.

And then, with a bare majority for the most irreversible act in human history and four hundred and forty-six people in the chamber who believe they have been steamrollered, a member of the losing side stands up and asks for the votes to be counted a third time on no procedural ground at all - because he wants to be able to tell his neighbours that he asked, and the answer was yes.

The expensive part of legitimacy is doing the unnecessary thing in front of the people who think it is necessary.

The fleet arrives at 11:04 on the twenty-ninth of October. What it does first is the most courteous act in this entire history, and nobody in the chamber expected it, and it takes ninety seconds for anyone to understand what they are looking at.

Book Five of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

Humanity has met the condition. The Lasan confirm the nine measures without amending a single figure and add three words that will frighten Asha Varghese for the rest of her life: that is early.

Then they ask their question. Membership is unlimited technology at no cost, for ever, with no obligation to request anything - and it cannot be left, cannot be revoked, and cannot be ceased.

There is one region in their own roll they will not discuss. Six or seven positions where the markers stop and resume. It was asked about in 2030 and met with eleven seconds of silence.

We will not answer this outside the Alliance.

So the species is asked to enter an irrevocable arrangement in order to be told the thing that would tell it whether to enter. It enters. Eleven days later it is told, in nine thousand words, and the answer is not a trick and was never concealed - it was withheld for a reason that turns the entire eight and a half years into something that had been run on us, honestly, in plain sight.

The Alliance is an agreement among species that none of us will cease alone.

The final book of Volume One. The purpose of the Lasan Alliance is disclosed, the Tirani are named, and a fisheries inspector from Ambon who read a document in a reading group asks the question that nobody in the room had the standing to ask.

It ends where it began: a woman of seventy-five in Bengaluru, an item in a queue, a plain in Ladakh, and the finding that there was never a right person and there has never once been one.

Book Six of six, and the close of Human Alliance, Volume One. The war it discloses is Volume Two.

Mira Kovač arrives naked in an Ontario wood at four in the morning on the fourteenth of May, 2029, eleven days later than the people who sent her intended. Nothing crosses with her. No clothes, no weapon, no documents, no proof that she was born in 2040 in a country that will one day be a republic with a president.

What she has is a body built to run at twenty-eight kilometres an hour, a drug grown into a pocket under her ribs that will keep that body from killing itself, and an instruction: keep the president alive until the third of December.

She knows how it goes. She has memorised the record. Five attempts on Étienne Rousseau's life, four of them failures, and the fifth one the reason a machine gets built that will one day remove her sister from the record of her own country — every document, every photograph, every registry line, until the people who loved her keep the memory and lose the proof.

What she does not know is why the record is wrong about almost everything that matters.

A thriller about the argument, not the chase

Mira is not the only person in 2029 who came from somewhere else. Teodor Vane has been here since 2027. He is seventy, he is dying, he has spent twenty years and eleven lives trying to stop the machine from ever existing — and the case he makes is the one she cannot answer.

Because her side keeps records, which means her side can be proved wrong in a court. And his side keeps none, which means nobody will ever be able to prove anything about the Undertow at all.

Fifty-one per cent against forty-nine. She is on the right side of it by about one per cent, and the book never pretends the margin is wider than that.

What you get

• A one-way time traveller with no gadgets, no backup and no way home — only a failing body and a date • An antagonist who is right about almost everything and is never secretly venal • A police inspector who cannot be told the truth and works it out anyway • A president who is not a symbol: a constitutional lawyer with a bad knee, a terminal diagnosis, and a signature four months from being worth more than his life • A body count that is counted — every death has a name, an age, and a line in a notebook that looks like accounts • A resolution that turns on a demonstration in front of four journalists, not on who shoots first

Super Agent Mira is a complete standalone novel of roughly 51,000 words, set in an alternate near future. It is a thriller for readers who want the moral argument to be as sharp as the action, in the tradition of the spy novel that is really about institutions.

A note on what this book is not

There are no gadgets and there is no way back. The technology is fixed, small and cruel: one direction, nothing crosses, an eleven-day error at forty-two years, and a drug that runs out. Nobody in this book saves everybody. The nurse who dies in chapter twenty-eight stays dead, and three chapters are spent on that, and if you want a thriller where the cost is announced and then quietly waived, this is not it.

Canada in these pages is a republic with a president. In the world you live in, it is a constitutional monarchy with a prime minister. Every institution, official and event in the book is invented.

Adam swears he never left the house. Then the rug turns up in a skip on the moor, with Leah's blood on it.

There's just one problem. Hannah wasn't at the window.

Everything she told the police was true, except the part that mattered. And the longer Adam sits in a prison cell waiting for a trial, the more Hannah starts to wonder who she was really protecting.

Everything She Told the Police is a twisty domestic thriller told by three people: the witness, the husband and the one person nobody is looking for.

• Short chapters, three narrators, and a twist you can go back and find the clues for. • A domestic thriller with no sexual content and no violence on the page. The danger is in what people believe. • Set in present-day Harrogate over one November.

Perfect for readers of Freida McFadden, Lisa Jewell and Claire Douglas.

She says yes.

She knows about the affair. She knows about the message Frankie sent Jude that night: Tell her tonight or I will. She knows the police are looking hard at her husband. And she knows the one thing nobody else does: on Tuesday night, between twenty to eleven and twenty past midnight, she wasn't at home.

DS Nasreen Qureshi of the Major Crime Team doesn't believe either of them. She has a woman in a yellow raincoat on a seafront camera, a second wine glass on the victim's table, and a husband who keeps saying we were both at home before anyone has asked about his wife.

The longer Georgie keeps her husband's alibi, the more it looks like her own. And she has started to wonder why, in five weeks, Jude has never once asked her where she was.

• A twisty domestic thriller told by a wife, a detective and, at the very end, a husband. • Set in present-day Brighton and Hove. • A standalone novel.

Upstairs, Arlo's hairbrush is clean. It's never clean on a Friday.

The babysitter's mother cuts hair on Church Street. Sophie's husband has been sitting in her chair since October. A child's toothbrush vanishes from a locked house. And when the police warn the woman off, she asks them to pass on one thing: a date. The nineteenth of January, 2023.

It is a date Sophie has spent four years trying not to remember.

The Babysitter's Phone is a twisty domestic thriller told by three women: the mother with a secret, the teenager who stole for hers, and the one person who has been grieving all along.

• Short chapters, three narrators, and more than one twist you can go back and find the clues for. • No sexual content and no violence on the page. The danger is in what a family will do to keep a child. • Set in present-day Reading over one January and February.

Perfect for readers of Freida McFadden, Lisa Jewell and Claire Douglas.

But Tavy's face has changed. She isn't drinking. She wants everyone there. And she wants to know, once and for all, who went down to the water with him that night.

By Sunday morning Tavy is in the millpond. A thread of Naomi's green scarf is caught on the sluice. An email Tavy sent at three in the morning names her. And Tavy had written to the police in January to accuse her.

Only one of the old friends seems to be on Naomi's side: Lydia, the barrister, who always knows exactly what to say. Then a solicitor in a bow tie delivers a letter, addressed to Lydia, in a dead woman's handwriting.

It begins: You're going to burn this.

The Last Good Weekend is a twisty domestic thriller told by two women who were once best friends, and by the one who planned it all.

• Short chapters, three narrators, and a twist you can go back and find every clue for. • No sexual content and no violence on the page. The danger is in what old friends will stay silent about. • Set in the present-day Cotswolds, Stroud and Bristol over one February and March.

Perfect for readers of Lucy Foley, Lisa Jewell and Claire Douglas.

It is the house where Claire's first husband fell to his death fifteen years ago. On the first afternoon, Claire sees the old brass key on her lodger's keyring. It is the key that vanished the night he died.

Ivy has come to prove Claire killed him. Claire has been lying about that night for fifteen years. And neither of them knows the truth — because the one person in the house who does has been waiting all summer for somebody brave enough to find it.

The Lodger's Key is a twisty domestic thriller about a staircase, a lie, a missing phone and a key that fits a door it shouldn't — told by two women who each think they know what happened in the house on Albemarle Terrace.

• Two narrators, short chapters, and a twist you can go back and find the clues for. • A domestic thriller with no sexual content and very little violence on the page — the danger is in the house. • Set in present-day Cheltenham over one October.

Perfect for readers of Freida McFadden, Alice Feeney and Lisa Jewell.

Two aces all in against two kings win 82.36% of the time. About 17 times in a hundred, the player with the aces loses the pot and has still played perfectly. Understanding that difference, between a good decision and a good result, is where becoming a strong poker player begins, and it is the thread running through The Best Player at the Table.

This is a plain-spoken guide to no-limit Texas hold'em, in cash games and tournaments, live and online. Every probability in it was calculated by counting every possible card, every study can be looked up, and every example is worked out so you can check it.

The foundations

• You are playing the people, not the house. Why being better than your opponents is not enough, and what the rake really costs a table. • The numbers you need. Starting hands, flops, outs and the rule of four and two, checked against the exact figures. • Pot odds and expected value, worked in full, so every call becomes a question with an answer. • Position, starting hands and ranges, with a cautious starting table by seat and what the famous all-in contests are really worth.

Playing well

• Betting with a purpose: value bets, bluffs, semi-bluffs and sizing. • Reading the board and narrowing a range, street by street, including blockers. • What research on 27 million online hands found about who wins, and what a study of professional players found about tells. • What the computer programs that beat top professionals taught everyone else, and why copying them is only half the answer. • Tournaments: stack sizes, and why chips are not money near the prizes.

The part away from the cards

• Why a genuinely winning player can still be behind after 10,000 hands, and what that means for your bankroll. • What tilt looks like from the inside, and what elite professionals do differently. • How strong players study: records, hand reviews and honest self-assessment. • Where online poker is legal in the United States, Great Britain and Ontario, as of 2026. • A plan for your next year at the table, plus reference tables and a session record sheet.

Three hard stops: play only where it is legal and you are old enough; there is no system that guarantees a profit; and if poker is costing you more than you can afford, help is free. The book gives helplines for the UK, the United States and Ontario.

This book contains no secret system and no promise of easy money. As a group, players lose money over time, and the book says so. The author is not a professional player and does not pretend to be. If you want to understand the game well enough to make better decisions than the people around you, and to judge yourself honestly, start here.

Marjorie "Midge" Alderton is seventy-nine, a retired village postmistress, and — though almost nobody in Wexham Staithe knows it — the setter of the Saturday cryptic crossword in the local paper.

At the village's Macmillan coffee morning, the formidable chair of the parish council stirs a spoon of honey into her peppermint tea and says it has a bite to it. Within the hour she has collapsed. By teatime she is dead. And in her handbag, addressed to Midge's secret crossword name, is a torn notebook page: one clue, and a request to check my working.

Somebody in Wexham Staithe has been at it for years. With her lodger the new village GP, her greyhound Biscuit (terrified of pigeons), and a detective sergeant she once sold sherbet lemons to, Midge sets out to solve the last clue a clever woman ever wrote — one handwriting, one flower bed and one coffee morning at a time.

• A clean, cosy, fair-play mystery: every clue is on the page before the reveal. • Set in present-day north Norfolk — saltmarsh, tide tables, a village hall and a great deal of cake. • Book one of the Midge Alderton Mysteries.

Perfect for readers of Richard Osman, M.C. Beaton and Agatha Christie.

Inside is a letter from Frank Rix, the old hall caretaker, who left the village in disgrace that winter, accused of stealing the prize money. It says the Show's winning Christmas cakes were baked in the judge's own bakery.

The judge is still judging. And on Show day she means to stand up at the prize-giving and tell the whole village the truth. At half past twelve she is found dead at the foot of a loft ladder she could never have climbed, and somebody has moved the winner's rosette.

With her lodger the village GP, her pigeon-fearing greyhound Biscuit, and a detective sergeant who has started coming round for coffee on Saturdays, Midge follows a trail of gold-headed pins, frost on a windscreen, a holly leaf with one berry too many, and a twenty-eight-year-old bank slip, to put right a wrong she should have questioned long ago.

• A clean, cosy, fair-play mystery set in present-day north Norfolk in the run-up to Christmas. • No sex, no swearing, and the death happens off the page. • Book two of the Midge Alderton Mysteries; reads on its own.

Dennis Wragg, tower captain and for thirty-six years the village postman, brings the puzzle to Midge Alderton, seventy-nine, retired postmistress and secret setter of the Saturday cryptic crossword, who remembers that afternoon because the bells were ringing for her fortieth birthday. Dennis means to find out who really rang the fourth, and to give that man the chance to explain himself.

A week later, on a still Saturday night, Midge hears somebody raise the tenor bell, evenly and beautifully, in four minutes flat. In the morning Dennis is found dead beneath its rope, and it looks like an accident. But Dennis couldn't raise that bell any more, and there is almost nobody in the village who could.

With her lodger the village GP, who has just taken up ringing, her pigeon-fearing greyhound Biscuit, and a detective sergeant who comes round for lemon cake on Saturdays, Midge follows a barking spaniel, a church clock that loses four minutes a week, a sympathy card with crossed sevens, and a purple and gold bell rope back to a quay in the dark in 1987.

• A clean, cosy, fair-play mystery set in present-day north Norfolk in a February of frost and bells. • No sex, no swearing, and the death happens off the page. • Book three of the Midge Alderton Mysteries; reads on its own.

The envelopes turn out to be a kindness from somebody who can hardly write. But Gideon is building a case of his own, about a famous rare bird, a television naturalist and a record his late father never believed. He promises to tell Midge all about it after the committee meets.

On a Friday evening in April, the day after he read Midge his high tide from his own little booklet, Gideon goes out alone to mend a plank across Garnet Creek, and the sea comes in behind him. Everybody says the marsh took him. Midge remembers the time he read out, and does the sum.

With her lodger the village GP, her pigeon-fearing greyhound Biscuit and a detective sergeant who would like one quiet spring, Midge follows a page with no ticks on it, a heap of coats at a bird-club talk, a pale patch of mud in a famous photograph, and a pencil note she wrote in the margin of a post-office ledger twenty-nine years ago.

• A clean, cosy, fair-play mystery set on the present-day north Norfolk coast in an April of spring tides. • No sex, no swearing, and the death happens off the page. • Book four of the Midge Alderton Mysteries; reads on its own.

So this year there is a new Father Christmas. Max Tovell is a careful retired bank manager and the fair's new treasurer, and he has been counting fifteen years of raffle stubs. Each one carries Midge's old post office date stamp. The money doesn't add up, and four prize winners don't seem to exist.

On the day of the Christmas fair, between one child and the next, Father Christmas takes a nip of mulled wine from his flask and dies in the vicarage chair. Everybody says it was his heart. Midge remembers a dent in a flask, a bay leaf that wasn't, and a winning ticket stamped with three letters where her stamp only ever printed two.

With her lodger the village GP, her greyhound Biscuit and a detective sergeant who would like one quiet Christmas, Midge follows a raffle drum, fifteen years of parish magazines, a wreath the size of a bicycle wheel, and a crossword clue meant for one reader only. It all leads to a brazier in the churchyard on Christmas Eve.

• A clean, cosy, fair-play mystery set in a present-day north Norfolk village from May to Christmas. • No sex, no swearing, and the death happens off the page. • The fifth and final Midge Alderton Mystery; reads on its own.

Wren Balfour builds flood defences for the City of Edinburgh Council. She has spent twenty-two years keeping the sea out — ever since the summer evening her mother let go of her hand on Portobello beach and walked into the water.

Then a stranger in a ferry jacket comes for the body at low water, and nobody but Wren can see him. Ronan Seil is an engineer on the Granton ferry. He is also two hundred and twelve years old, heir to a court of sea folk hidden under the old harbour wall at Leith — and he cannot tell a lie. So he tells her the truth: he has been ordered to bring her to his queen before the full-moon tide.

The Salt Court is starving. The cold court of the inland lochs is coming down the Water of Leith to take the Forth. And Wren is the price of a promise her mother made before she was born.

She has one October, a flood protection scheme, a best friend in a portakabin — and a man who can only ever tell her what is true.

• A contemporary romantasy set in present-day Edinburgh and Leith — selkies, bargains and a flood on a spring tide. • Two narrators, a slow burn and a love story told by a hero who literally cannot lie. • Sensual, not explicit. Book one of the Salt Court series.

Perfect for readers of Sarah J. Maas, Holly Black and Juliet Marillier.

On the longest night of the year Wren is to carry the Salt Crown across the court's hall, as her grandmother did before her, so that the Firth of Forth will say yes to the court for one more year. And Ronan, who cannot lie, suddenly has something he cannot tell her.

Then the lights go out, and the crown is gone.

To hold the Forth together until the full-moon tide, Wren will have to choose the court over the man she loves. She will have to sit in a seat she never wanted. And, on Christmas Eve, she will have to do the one thing she has never managed: put on her own skin and go into the Hollow's water.

• Contemporary romantasy set in present-day Edinburgh and the Pentlands, told by both of them. • Sensual, not explicit. A hero who cannot lie, a promise he cannot break, and a heroine who builds sea walls. • Book two of five. Start with A Court Beneath the Forth.

For readers who love selkie legends, fated bargains and slow-burn love with teeth.

Then her mother walks into the fish bar downstairs, twenty-two years after she walked into the sea at Portobello and left a seven-year-old on the sand.

The empty seat under the Shore knows three women now: Morvoren, who has held it too long; Mairi, the true queen come home; and Wren. At the bottom of the first spring ebb after the equinox moon, each will sit, and the Forth will ask what she will give. Mairi says she has come to lose. Ronan Seil, who cannot lie, knows how carefully salt folk choose their words.

And six hours after the trying, the biggest surge since 2010 is coming up the Forth.

• Contemporary romantasy set in present-day Leith and Edinburgh, told by both of them. • Sensual, not explicit. A mother and daughter, a hero who cannot lie, and a heroine who fights for a sea wall with a spreadsheet. • Book three of five. Start with A Court Beneath the Forth.

For readers who love selkie legends, fated bargains and slow-burn love with teeth.

Then the Water of Leith starts running backwards at night. The Salt Court's spring under Leith Shore turns sweet, and the oldest of the court begin to cough in their niches. The lord of the Hollow wants Ronan, and he's found two things Ronan wants more than himself.

So Ronan makes a bargain at the meeting of the waters: he'll go under Harlaw and stay there until the Forth itself comes for him.

The Forth doesn't climb hills. But an old law says where the Ebb walks, the Forth walks. Wren has a borrowed flask, the shortest night of the year and twelve miles of road to cover. Every cold line she crosses between the Shore and the Pentlands will cost her a year of her life.

• A contemporary romantasy of selkies, sweet-water lords and very literal promises, set in present-day Edinburgh. • Found family, a council spreadsheet, and a heroine who says excuse me to the drowned. • Sensual, not explicit. Book 4 of 5 in The Salt Court: read books 1 to 3 first.

For readers who love bargains with loopholes, sea magic and a love that pays its own way.

He also has her grandmother, chained in silver under a dam since 1978.

What Wren has: a court of forty, a colleague with a spreadsheet and a man at Scottish Water who owes her two favours, a boss who has booked the Shore for a "flood exercise", and two hundred flasks. There are sixty drowned people in the river who want to go home, and a song she hasn't sung in front of anyone since she was seven.

And Ronan Seil, who cannot lie, has worked out what opens silver. He hasn't told her the price.

The last book of the Salt Court: a war fought with taps and flasks, a bargain made at the top of the tide, and a wedding the day after they win.

• Contemporary romantasy set in present-day Leith and the Pentland Hills. • Sensual, not explicit. Selkies, a river lord, a council engineer, and a love that chooses to grow old. • Book five of five. The series finale.

Hallie Sorensen runs the tiny museum of Pell Harbor, Maine, and she holds the keys to Tern Point Light. The day after Labor Day, the government sells the lighthouse at auction. Her little historical society, run by a retired teacher in a bow tie and fed by a church pie committee, means to buy it and keep it open to everyone.

Then Nate Whitaker drives up from Boston. He is an architect, he is seasick, he puts mayonnaise on a lobster roll, and he has come to survey the tower for the man who wants to turn it into a luxury inn.

On his first morning, he finds that somebody has been loosening the railing forty feet above the rocks.

Somebody else has a key. The great glass lens in the town museum no longer throws rainbows. A report says the tower is falling down, and it isn't. And the Society's money is not where it should be. With the auction clock running down, an enemy from Boston turns out to be the only person in town who can read a set of plans, and a very bad sailor ends up in a lobster-boat race.

Last Light at Tern Point is a warm, funny Maine romance: enemies to lovers in the fog, a real mystery with a deadline, a lobsterman grandfather of eighty-one who will not stay off the water, and a church pie committee run like a cartel.

For readers who want:

• Enemies to lovers with a clock ticking • A small-town mystery with the money in plain sight • Maine at the end of summer: fog, lobster rolls, a boat race and a lighthouse • A whole town of characters, including a Newfoundland dog who is afraid of gulls • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A grandparent's death before the story begins; danger at sea.

For forty-one years, Fontenot's Bakery on Magazine Street has baked the official king cake of the Krewe of Mirabelle. Delphine Fontenot braids it the way her grandmother taught her at the age of seven: four strands, never three.

Then Owen Mercer opens across the street. He is a burned-out Chicago pastry chef with his late grandmother's recipe box and a three-strand braid. On Twelfth Night, the blind tasting goes to him.

That same morning, the krewe's captain calls in a debt on Delphine's bakery that her father swore was forgiven, and gives her until Ash Wednesday to pay.

The forgiving letter is somewhere in the building. Her father hid it "under the lid," and she has opened every lid she owns. Somebody switches off her walk-in in the night. A page goes missing from the krewe's minute book. And when the float barn burns, Delphine and Owen are inside it.

King Cake Rules is a warm, funny New Orleans romance: rivals to lovers across one street, a real mystery with a Carnival deadline, a grandmother who rigs the king cake baby, a pink costume nobody should have to wear in public, and an elderly parrot who knows a great deal more than he is saying.

For readers who want:

• Rivals to lovers, with flour on everything • A small-business mystery with a deadline and a paper trail • New Orleans at Carnival: parades, brass bands, king cake and Mardi Gras morning • A whole street of characters, including a parrot who tells tall men to go to hell • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A parent's death before the story begins; a fire.

Dr. Sadie Brannock bought the vet clinic in Tamarack, Montana, in September. By December, half the valley would still rather drive forty miles than let a woman from the Cities touch their cattle. Her only reliable company is a camel nobody else would take.

Cole Bridger runs the Heart K, the ranch his family has worked since 1911. Somebody is cutting his fences and stealing his cows in the dark. At the end of the year the bank will count every bred cow on the place, and if there are fewer than 380, it can call his loan.

Then his grandmother enters him in the church's Cowboy Christmas Auction, and the only way out is to be engaged. So he announces that he is. To the vet. Who has just walked in with the camel.

Now they have to be convincing until Christmas Day: at church, at the dance, at his grandmother's table, under a bale of mistletoe with the whole valley watching. And every week the count gets closer to the number that could take the Heart K away.

The Christmas Brand is a warm, funny Montana romance: a fake engagement that stops being fake, a real mystery told in brands and scars, a rodeo-queen grandmother who has arranged everything, and a camel who may just save Christmas by lying down.

For readers who want:

• A fake engagement with rules, and one that breaks every one of them • A ranch mystery with a deadline and a real clue a vet would spot • Montana at Christmas: blizzards, a living nativity, a church auction and a line shack in a storm • A whole valley of characters, including a camel with opinions • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A parent's and a grandparent's death before the story begins; animals hurt and put down.

For thirty-eight years the Tremblays have built the ice palace of Saint-Aubin-des-Neiges, a village on a frozen lake in Québec, out of nineteen hundred blocks cut by hand. Now the carnival's new ski-resort sponsor has hired Wyatt Callender, world ice-art champion from Fairbanks, Alaska, to design something bigger. Élise Tremblay and her crew get to cut his blocks.

His design has a spiraling tower twenty-one meters high. Élise says it will fall down. Her father says it will be something to see before it does.

Then the palace starts to crack. One side of the tower goes soft overnight at minus twenty-four. And the only clue is a small round hole that should not be there.

Now two rivals who cannot agree on anything are keeping watch together in a pickup truck at two in the morning, while a six-foot otter mascot nobody will admit to wearing walks across the lake with a lantern. The carnival opens in eleven days. The inspector is losing patience. The prize money is about to vanish. And when the evidence points at one of them, the other has to decide what to believe.

The Ice Palace is a warm, funny enemies-to-lovers romance set at a Québec winter carnival: a snow bath in borrowed pineapple swim trunks, an ice-canoe race through broken ice, a village that notices everything, and a palace that must stand until the lights go out on closing night.

For readers who want:

• Rivals who respect each other's hands long before they admit anything else • A sabotage mystery with a real clue you can taste • A Québec village in February: tuques, tourtière, a dépanneur and a mascot with a secret • A heroine who gets it badly wrong and sets it right in public • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A parent's death before the story begins; a near-drowning.

Clem Rafuse is a fruit-tree scientist in Ontario who hasn't been home for the harvest in fifteen years. Then her grandfather has a stroke on a ladder, and she drives fifteen hundred kilometers to the family orchard on Nova Scotia's Minas Basin. There she finds Ezra Vail, a retired Halifax firefighter who bought the farm next door, running the harvest and doing it the right way.

The Rafuses own something no one else in the world has: the Mercy Pippin, a russet apple with red flesh that grows on one dying tree planted in 1881. Her grandfather grafted forty young trees to save it.

Then the young trees disappear in the night. Someone cuts a ring round the old tree's trunk. A big fruit company unveils "its" new apple at the church fall fair. And the neighbor Clem is starting to trust knows something he isn't telling her.

With the Fundy tide rising twice a day, a grandfather who can only spell his warnings one letter at a time, and a cider barn about to burn, Clem has to decide what she came home for, and who she can believe.

The Orchard at Cape Mercy is a slow-burn Canadian romance with a real mystery at its heart, set in apple country at Thanksgiving: three turkeys and one oven, a pumpkin weigh-off that ends in a recount, a church lady who keeps the only records that matter, and a truck lost to the Bay of Fundy.

For readers who want:

• A homecoming slow burn between two people who both know how to keep quiet • A mystery you can solve with a paring knife and a fair ledger from 1912 • Nova Scotia in the fall: dikes, tides, cider, and a whole village watching • A family that argues about gravy and would die for each other • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A stroke and its aftermath; a barn fire; a parent's death before the story begins.

Marit Halvorsen runs the ski patrol at Larch Valley, a small resort town in the Alberta Rockies. In 2018 the Kestrel Couloir buried her for fourteen minutes. Her fiancé, the forecaster who had opened it, dug the last meter with his bare hands, sat outside her hospital room for three days, and then left her a one-line note and drove to the airport.

Now it's December, and the Kestrel keeps sliding at three in the morning, on still, clear nights, for no reason anyone can find. Marit knows the crown is wrong. The resort says it's natural. And the province sends its new regional forecaster to look.

It's Jonah Ashdown.

With a big mountain company ready to buy the resort at the right price, charges missing from the explosives magazine, and a town that remembers exactly who opened the Kestrel on her, Marit and Jonah have to work together to find out who is bringing the mountain down, before Christmas, and before someone is under it.

Avalanche Hearts is a second-chance Christmas romance with a real mystery: an ugly-sweater ski race, a Santa who keeps losing his beard, a grandmother who bakes and knits and is always right, a torchlight parade down a mountain, and an avalanche dog with very firm opinions about who is staying.

For readers who want:

• A second chance that has to face the reason it was needed • A sabotage mystery told in snow, a scorched glove and a forged signature • A ski town at Christmas, from the patrol shack to the bakery • A dog who steals hats and decides things • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. Avalanche peril, a burial and a rescue on the page.

New York perfumer Avery Lindell has built the best fragrance of her life around a single vial of lavender essence from a hill village in Provence. There is a note in it nobody can find anywhere else on earth: cold and bright, like a mountain after lightning. Now her company wants the whole field, and ten years of harvests besides.

The field belongs to the Aubanels. Luc Aubanel is proud, exhausted, and hiding a bank letter from his eighty-eight-year-old grandmother. And Marcelline Aubanel has sold her lavender to nobody outside the family for fifty years.

So Luc proposes. Not for real. Three weeks, a borrowed ring, and a village that believes every word.

Then, on the night of Bastille Day, the family distillery burns to the ground, and every drop of this year's essence goes with it. Avery's secret formula turns up in a rival Paris perfume. A press release from New York tells the whole world the engagement was a deal. And the only one on the plateau who seems to have seen through them from the start is a goat.

The Lavender Contract is a fake-engagement summer romance with a real mystery: a pétanque tournament with a family recipe at stake, fireworks over a ruined castle, a nose that can smell a lie, and a grandmother who has been watching faces across a pitch since 1961.

For readers who want:

• A fake relationship that turns real, and has to pay for the lie • A mystery solved by smell, a pencil and a stubborn goat • Provence in July: lavender, heat, a village square and Quatorze Juillet • A grandmother who is always one move ahead • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A fire on the page, no one hurt.

Maisie Kettering quit her accounting job in Ohio, spent her savings, and wrote to forty-three Paris pâtisseries asking to be an apprentice for six months. One answered. Three lines. If you are late you may not come.

Mathis Berthelot is the grumpiest pastry chef in the Marais. He throws her croissants in the trash on the first morning. He has not smiled since his grandfather died and the green notebook holding the family's recipes vanished on the day of the funeral, taking with it the secret of the famous Bûche des Neiges, whose snow crackles like a winter morning when the knife goes in. His rent is about to triple. His only hope is a televised Christmas competition.

And the only creature in the shop who likes Maisie on sight is his dachshund, who wears a Santa hat from Advent to Epiphany and bites anybody who tries to take it off.

Then someone puts salt in their sugar. Someone pulls the plug on their blast chiller on live television. And the judges' scores do not add up, which is a problem for somebody, because Maisie has never met a set of numbers she could not read.

Sugar in the Snow is a grumpy-sunshine Christmas romance with a real mystery: a bûche collapse on live TV rescued in fourteen minutes, a grocery bill from 1971, snow falling on the Seine, and a dog who knows exactly who belongs in his kitchen.

For readers who want:

• A grump who melts slowly, and has to earn her back • A heroine whose superpower is spreadsheets • Paris at Christmas, from a bakery kitchen at four in the morning • A lost family recipe and a competition that is rigged • A dachshund in a Santa hat

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language.

On a November night in 2006, Katell Kerguen's father took his boat out to the black rocks at the mouth of the Aber in a storm, and never came home. Six weeks later she left her Breton village for Oregon, without saying goodbye to the boy who had opened an oyster for her on those rocks when she was sixteen.

Now she's a shellfish toxicologist, and the oysters on the Aber Kerlann are dying. The village says it's a virus. The mayor says it's a virus. Katell can smell from the top of the hill that it isn't.

Erwan Tanguy stayed. He runs his great-grandfather's oyster beds, writes the count in pencil in a green ledger every tide, and has never forgiven her. But he's the only one who can take her out to the rocks.

What they find there will close the whole estuary, turn the village against her, and bring a boatyard owner with a beautiful plan for a marina very close to getting everything he wants. Unless a grandmother who has cheated at cards every Thursday for thirty-six years finally plays the card she has been hiding for twenty.

The Oyster Tide is a second-chance romance with a real mystery: a Breton fest-noz, a gavotte danced by the little finger, an old man who speaks only in weather forecasts, and a lost boat that was never just a storm.

For readers who want:

• A second chance that has to face why it was needed • A mystery solved at low tide with a sample bottle • Brittany in storm season: granite, oysters, cider and the sea • A grandmother who is always one card ahead • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A death at sea, twenty years in the past.

Casey Maddox has spent every dollar she has turning an old hop barn in a Bavarian market town into a brewery. The town has drunk one beer for four hundred years, from the Brauerei Brandl across the square, and it has no intention of drinking hers. It doesn't help that her grandfather was the apprentice who walked out of the Brandl doorway in 1956 and never came back.

Hannes Brandl has a leaking roof, a loan from 1998, an uncle who wants to sell, and a man from a brewing conglomerate who wants to buy. The one thing he's sure of is his Festbier. Then the town decides the autumn fest beer by blind tasting, and his beer turns sour in the tank.

Casey wins the tent. Two days later the Brandl master yeast disappears from the tower, and a DNA test says the yeast in Casey's steel case is the same strain. The whole town knows what that means. She stole it. Or her grandfather did.

Four hundred and twelve boxes in the Brandl archive hold the truth about 1956. A brass band needs a tuba. And a cow with a flowering crown on her horns keeps trying to walk up the wrong path.

Brewer's Luck is a rivals-to-lovers romance with a real mystery. It has a brass band, a tailor who has fitted every Brandl since 1972, a very old man with a euphonium, and a festival tent where three thousand people sing the last song standing on the benches.

For readers who want:

• Rivals across a market square who have to trust each other • A mystery solved with a microscope and a stores ledger • Bavaria in festival season: Lederhosen, dirndls, the cows coming down from the mountain • A grandfather's name to clear, seventy years late • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. No violence on the page.

Harper Quinlan is a fire-safety engineer from Pittsburgh. She doesn't go near bonfires, and she hasn't watched a firework since the winter her father went into a burning warehouse and didn't come out. So of course her firm sends her to a small town on the Valencian coast for the Fallas: nineteen days of firecrackers at eight in the morning, a thunderous two o'clock show every afternoon, and a final night when the whole town burns the giant monuments it has spent a year building.

Her job is to certify the biggest one: El Fènix, a twenty-three-meter phoenix fourteen meters from the town hall balcony. On her first morning she tells its artist it's too tall.

Nacho Ferrús builds fallas the way his grandfather did, by eye, with a secret cut in the mast that nobody outside the family has ever seen. He has thirteen days to finish his bird, a treasurer who keeps delaying the last payment, and no time for an American with a decibel meter.

Then somebody sets fire to his yard. And the insurance on the phoenix turns out to be worth a great deal more if it burns early.

Fire Season is an enemies-to-lovers romance with a real mystery. It has a paella contest and a slice of chorizo that scandalizes a whole town, a grandmother who has judged the rice for forty years, a bell tower of two hundred and eleven steps, and the loudest two o'clock in Europe.

For readers who want:

• Opposites who have to learn each other's trade • A mystery solved with a stopwatch, a wiring plan and a match flag • Spain in festival season: orange blossom, gunpowder, silk and fire • A heroine who learns to let go without losing herself • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A past death in a fire, off the page; a tense bomb-disposal scene.

Bronte Callister is the captain of the Tallow Bay surf club, on a long beach on the New South Wales coast. It's two weeks before Christmas, it's thirty-four degrees, and her ex-fiancé is marrying somebody else at the club on Saturday. The whole town is waiting to watch her watch him.

Wes Harland is a fire investigator from California on a three-month exchange. He walks straight past the flags into the only rip on the beach on a Friday afternoon, and she has to go in after him in front of forty people. The next night, at the club Christmas party, her mother shouts across two hundred people that he's Bronte's boyfriend. He puts his arm round her and doesn't let go.

He has his reasons. Somebody has been lighting small fires on the headland every few Saturdays, each one closer to the old club boatshed, and in a town that won't talk to outsiders, a local girlfriend opens doors. Then the club's tower fund turns out to be empty. Eighty-six thousand dollars, raised by three Christmas raffles, is gone. And the only record of who held the card is in a filing cabinet in the boatshed.

A Summer Christmas is a fake-dating romance with a real mystery. It has a Santa who arrives on a jet ski, a Christmas Day cricket match on the sand, a roast dinner in thirty-four degrees, and a cockatoo who repeats everything he has heard, including the one thing somebody didn't want repeated.

For readers who want:

• A fake relationship with rules on a napkin, and the rules breaking one by one • A mystery solved with a stopwatch, a bank printout and an exercise book in pencil • Australia at Christmas: surf, sausage rolls, carols on the sand and a hot westerly • A heroine who saves people for a living, and a hero who learns to be saved • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending.

Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A bushfire and a burning building, with no one killed.

Tessa Marwood's grandmother ran the Hollin Fell Inn for sixty-four years, eleven hundred feet up a Yorkshire dale, with a boiler called Duncan, a Candle Supper every December since 1962, and a loan from a pub company that falls due at noon on Christmas Eve.

Edie died in February. The loan did not.

Tessa has saved every penny since, and she is still short. So when a snowstorm closes the pass and strands a full house of guests at the inn for Christmas week, it looks like the best luck she's had all year — until the bookings start cancelling themselves, the cellar floods overnight through a valve nobody has touched since 2010, and a one-star review accuses her kitchen of poisoning a family who never ate there.

Somebody wants her to miss that deadline. Somebody who knows exactly where the drain is.

Then there's the man in the Fell Room. Joel Ashby says he's walking the Pennine Way. He arrived in brogues. He has never opened his map (the donkey ate it), he knows far too much about lead valleys, and he fixes her roof in nine minutes flat while she tells him, lying on the slates in the snow, exactly how much she owes.

He works for the company that lent it.

Snowed In at Hollin Fell is a Christmas romance with a mystery at its heart and a donkey called Brenda at the centre of almost everything: six snowbound days, a saboteur in the family, an elderly magician with a weakness for other people's teaspoons, a honeymooning true-crime podcaster who will not stop saying dossier, and a village of ninety-three people who come up the hill in the dark on tractor trailers, singing, because everyone came anyway.

For readers who want:

• Snowed-in, forced-proximity romance with a secret that has to come out — and the fallout when it does • A real mystery with real clues, and a deadline you can watch on the clock • A heroine who does her own sums and a hero who is good with his hands and bad with the truth • An inn full of eccentric guests, a vicar with opinions, and a donkey with timing • A Yorkshire Christmas you can smell: woodsmoke, candle wax and roast potatoes on the bar fire

A standalone novel with a happy ending. The villain doesn't go quietly, and the inn's troubles don't all end on Christmas Eve — but love does win, by about two per cent, which is usually enough.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A grandparent's death before the story begins, and a mother living with dementia.

Every Advent for ninety-five years, Edinburgh has queued to see the Wee Red Lassie — a girl in a scarlet cloak, singing on the frozen Nor' Loch in a painting from 1785 that hangs over one small gallery's fireplace every December.

This year a ginger cat goes for a fiddler's bow, a tray of mulled wine goes over, and paintings conservator Isla Rennie takes the Lassie back to her studio to clean.

Under the varnish, she finds that the city's favourite painting is a fake.

The insurers send a loss adjuster to find out where the real one went. He is Euan Strachan — who walked out three weeks before their Christmas wedding seven years ago, leaving a note that said it isn't you, the same month Isla's evidence sent his father to prison for forgery.

And the police already have a suspect. His father.

Now there's a thistle hidden under the paint, a break-in at the studio, a charming chairman in a hurry to be paid, a London dealer with very cold eyes, and twenty-four days until a crate leaves Leith for Geneva. To find the painting, Isla will have to trust the one man she swore she never would again — and he will have to tell her, at last, why he left.

The Christmas Forgery is a second-chance Christmas romance with a real mystery at its heart: a ceilidh band with an average age of seventy-six and a rule never to stop playing for anything short of fire, a gallery cat who hates everyone except the insurance man, a borrowed kilt four inches too short, and a big wheel that stops at the top at exactly the wrong moment.

For readers who want:

• A second chance built on a secret worth keeping, and worth telling • A real art-world mystery with fair clues, paint science and a deadline • Edinburgh at Christmas: the market, the Meadows, a ceilidh, Hogmanay on Calton Hill • A grandmother who plays the accordion like a weapon • A happy ending that is earned, not given

A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not every villain is caught, and not everything that is saved comes back undamaged — but love wins, and the band never stops playing.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language.

The Pascoes and the Trevennas have not agreed on anything since Christmas Eve, 1953. Nobody in the Cornish fishing village of Polgarrow can remember why. They only know which end of the pub to stand at.

Then, at her grandmother's wake, boatbuilder and lifeboat helm Kerensa Pascoe watches ninety-three-year-old Walter Trevenna stand up in front of the whole village and make an announcement. He will give his half of the old pilchard palace on the quay — the lifeboat's home for sixty-five years — to the lifeboat, for ever. On one condition.

A Pascoe and a Trevenna must be engaged to be married by Christmas Day.

There is exactly one available Trevenna. Kit, a London chef with a star to his name and a return ticket, who rammed Kerensa's dinghy when they were twelve and laughed.

So they get engaged. For pretend. For Walter, and the lifeboat, and a building. It will end in January, and nobody will get hurt.

Except that her grandmother's will has vanished, somebody is searching her cottage by torchlight, Walter's hearing aids keep going mysteriously flat before his capacity assessment, a developer in a gilet wants the whole harbour — and Kit has been cast as the back half of the pantomime horse, with Kerensa's furious uncle in the front.

And there is a storm coming on Christmas Eve.

An Engagement for Christmas is a warm, funny, heart-in-your-mouth Cornish Christmas romance: a fake engagement between feuding families, a real mystery with fair clues, a village pantomime that goes gloriously wrong, and a lifeboat that has to launch when it matters most.

For readers who want:

• A fake engagement that stops being fake at exactly the wrong moment • Two feuding families, one very old love story, and seventy-three years of stubbornness • A real mystery — who took the will, and where did Gran hide it? • A village panto, a pantomime horse with two very unwilling halves, and a director who was in the original Cats (at the back) • Christmas on the Cornish coast, with a lifeboat, a storm, and a happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not everything is saved, and not everything that is lost comes back — but love wins, and the lifeboat goes out.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A grandmother's death before the story begins; peril at sea.

On a short, smart street in London's West End, two department stores face each other across forty feet of tarmac. Every first of December they unveil their Christmas windows at the same moment, and half of London comes to watch.

Ruby Adeyemi dresses the windows of Halloran's, the creaking family store her boss's great-grandmother founded in 1897. Theo Marchetti dresses the windows of Beaumont & Vale, the glass-and-gold palace across the road. His windows have won three Christmases running. He nods at her on the pavement. She would quite like to throw something at him.

This year it isn't a prize at stake. Halloran's 84-year-old owner has signed a deal with the store across the road: if Halloran's December takings fail to beat last year's, she must sell.

Then, twelve seconds after the switch-on, every light in Ruby's windows goes out. Somebody is getting into them at night. And one Sunday morning the store's famous diamond necklace, in its centre window every Christmas for over a century, vanishes, and turns up round the neck of Theo's ice queen.

Theo is the obvious suspect. Ruby is the only person who believes he didn't do it. With her windows sealed by the police in the busiest week of the year, the only way to save the shop may be to ask her rival for help, and to put something in the windows that nobody on the street has ever seen.

The Christmas Window is a warm, funny, suspenseful London Christmas romance: rivals to lovers, a real mystery with fair clues, a staff Secret Santa, a lift that stops between floors, and a mother who sends forty texts a day and ends up as an angel in a shop window.

For readers who want:

• Rivals to lovers across a very narrow street • A missing necklace, a sabotaged switch-on, and a countdown to Christmas Eve • A family department store with a haberdashery counter that knows everything • A mother from Cork who is nobody's fool, and an Italian father who runs a café in Clerkenwell • Christmas in London, and a happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending. The shop is saved. Not everything in it is, but love wins, and the windows light up.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A parent's death before the story begins.

Maeve Keohane is the last postmistress of Portnacree, a small village on the Kerry coast. Three generations of Keohanes have stood behind that counter, and on New Year's Eve the post office closes for good.

Then Adam Larkin, a quiet English stonemason in Portnacree only to sell a cottage he never knew his late mother owned, takes down the damp wall behind her counter. Inside it is a mailbag. In the mailbag is the village's whole Christmas post from 1974: a hundred and sixty-seven cards, letters and parcels that everybody believed had been lost in a storm.

Maeve decides to deliver every one of them, by hand, before she locks the door for the last time.

So they go door to door together, in the rain, in Adam's van: a letter to Santa from a seven-year-old who is now a grandmother, a card from an old flame delivered in front of a wife of sixty years, a council letter about a septic tank. And slowly, two strangers stop being strangers.

But one letter has gone missing. Somebody breaks into the post office to find out which. And the week before that Christmas in 1974, a girl of twenty was knocked down on the cliff road by a driver who never stopped.

The Lost Christmas Post is a warm, funny, aching Irish Christmas romance: a slow burn between strangers, a real mystery fifty years cold, a village that sings carols on the harbour, and a Christmas Day swim in the Atlantic with a parish priest running a book on who will scream.

For readers who want:

• A slow burn that earns every kiss • A cold case hidden in the Christmas post • A whole village of characters: a postman who sings to every door, a sea-swimming captain six feet tall, and a priest with a notebook of odds • Kerry at Christmas: storms, carols, the Wren Boys and the Atlantic in December • A happy ending that has to be earned

A standalone novel with a happy ending. Not everything gets there, but love does, and the truth.

Sensual, not explicit: love scenes are implied, never described. Mild language. A death in the past; a parent's death before the story begins; a fire.

Imogen Hartley is thirty-seven, a London divorce solicitor on the brink of partnership, and home in Merrow Bay for one weekend — until her mother stands up over the crab and announces that she has sold Hartley's, the family's 1936 seafront ice-cream parlour, to a boutique hotel company, and is off to see the world.

Rhodri Emlyn is the architect hired to turn it into a hotel. He is Welsh, recently and very politely divorced, and he has fallen hopelessly in love with a black glass counter and a terrazzo floor full of scallop shells. He is not supposed to fall for the eldest Hartley daughter as well.

Then the sale starts going wrong. Forty-one planning objections arrive overnight — seventeen of them from people buried in the churchyard. Someone pulls the plug on four hundred litres of ice cream. A bat roost appears in a loft that has never seen a bat. With five weeks to exchange, four sisters, a seventy-two-year-old ice-cream maker and a great many gulls, Imogen has to work out who is trying to stop the sale — and what she wants for herself.

• A warm, funny seaside romance with a mystery at its heart, set on the present-day Northumberland coast. • Sensual, not explicit. Two narrators. A found family you'll want to move in with. • Book one of the Merrow Bay Sisters — every sister gets her own story.

Perfect for readers of Jenny Colgan, Sarah Morgan and Holly Martin.

Billie Hartley is thirty-five, the best inshore lifeboat helm on the Northumberland coast, and the only Hartley sister who never left Merrow Bay. She applied for the coxswain's job three times. They gave it to a man from Cornwall.

Jago Tregenza arrives with a one-eyed cat, a holdall full of spare parts and a way of saying no that Billie has never heard before. Two and a half years ago, off the Runnel Stone, he said yes to a gap in the rocks — and a young crewman didn't come home. He hasn't said yes since. Within an hour he has called her engine a disgrace. Within a week he has made her go round the outside.

Then, on the night of a storm ten, Ned Pattinson — the crabber who taught Billie to splice on the harbour wall — sends a mayday off Merrow Island and vanishes. The town lays flowers on his empty mooring. But the wreckage came ashore on the wrong side of the island, his beacon stopped after five minutes, his wife hasn't cried once, and a man in a black Range Rover keeps parking by the causeway.

To find out what really happened to Ned, Billie will have to trust the one man she can't stand — and he will have to learn to let her take the helm.

• A warm, funny seaside romance with a mystery at its heart, set on the present-day Northumberland coast. • Enemies to lovers, a night stranded in a refuge box, and a found family you'll want to move in with. Sensual, not explicit. • Book two of the Merrow Bay Sisters — can be read on its own; every sister gets her own story.

Perfect for readers of Jenny Colgan, Sarah Morgan and Holly Martin.

Jules Garnier is not, whatever the town has decided, French. He is a baker's son from Lewisham with flour to the elbows, a laugh you can hear from the harbour and a very clean dishwasher, and on his opening day his window holds a Christmas tart that tastes exactly like her father's.

The night before, her father's recipe book disappeared from a locked workroom.

The book goes back to 1968. It holds her granny's vanilla, her dad's handwriting and a pencil outline of her own hand at eight years old. To get it back, Delia will have to work beside the one man in town she has sworn to hate. She will have to meet a formidable old baker, learn the story of a recipe swapped every Christmas Eve for twenty-eight years, and decide, before the year runs out, where the salt tastes right.

• A warm, funny contemporary romance with a little mystery, set in a Northumberland seaside town at Christmas. • Sensual, not explicit. Rival bakers, a found family, and a heroine who says the true thing first. • Book three of the Merrow Bay Sisters; reads on its own.

Rafe Lowrie lives on the island in his late grandmother's cottage, under a roof that leaks into five containers, and every morning he photographs the sunrise from the same stone. At their first meeting he asks Juno what her fiancé looks like when he laughs. She can't remember.

Then the balance she paid for the venue turns out never to have arrived. The caterer doesn't exist either. Twelve thousand pounds of wedding money has gone to the wrong account, and Juno isn't the only bride on the island who has been robbed.

With six weeks to go, a fiancé who keeps disappearing on Tuesday evenings, an eighty-one-year-old treasurer with a green cashbook, and a thousand sunrises that turn out to have caught something nobody else saw, Juno has to find out who took the money. She also has to find out why a man with a camera sees her more clearly than the man she is supposed to marry.

• A warm, funny contemporary romance with a little mystery, set on a Northumberland tidal island in spring. • Sensual, not explicit. A wedding fraud, a lighthouse keeper's sixty-five-year proposal, and a seal called Norris. • Book four of the Merrow Bay Sisters; reads on its own.

The man writing the environmental survey ties up his boat at the old stone jetty at dawn. Magnus Halcrow is a Shetland marine surveyor with a broken nose and very bad coffee, and he writes down exactly what he measures. Posy marches down the jetty and demands his name and his boat. He tells her the bank owns two thirds of the boat. Then he asks to see her notebook.

Because on fourteen mornings the seals have gone before sunrise. Somebody is flying a drone over the beach in the half-light. Somebody is raking out the little terns' nests and stealing the cameras, so the survey will find nothing worth saving. Then, in thick fog, the engines of Magnus's boat die three hundred metres off a reef.

Now Posy and Magnus have a tide table, a lighthouse keeper's exercise book and a clause nobody has read since 1974. They also have one chance, on the morning the midsummer spring tide comes in over the causeway.

• A warm, funny seaside romance with a real mystery, set on the Northumberland coast in June. • Sensual, not explicit. Seals, terns, a lifeboat, and five sisters. • The fifth and final book of The Merrow Bay Sisters; reads on its own.