The Merrow Bay Sisters

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.