Murder on the Marsh Walk

Read sample ▶ Listen to a sample

The man who knew every creek on Stiffkey marsh was caught by the tide. Midge Alderton wants to see his tide table. A MIDGE ALDERTON MYSTERY · BOOK FOUR Gideon Pryke has walked the north Norfolk saltmarsh for twenty years and never lost a walker, a dog or a boot. He has one rule: off the marsh four hours before high water. Not three and a half. So when somebody posts him four anonymous tide tables with one Saturday ringed in red, he brings them to Midge Alderton, eighty, retired postmistress and secret setter of the Saturday cryptic crossword. 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.