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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.