Last Clue Down

Seven cards. One frozen Broad. And the last clue is the hardest.

It is Christmas on the Norfolk Broads, the hardest frost for years has frozen Wrayham Broad from shore to shore, and the whole village is getting out its skates. Dr Constance Larwood, former dictionary editor and the crossword setter Bittern, has been given a pair of her great-aunt's old fen runners, a boatyard owner to hold her up on them, and an unwanted Christmas guest: Dunstan Vosper, the publisher who axed her dictionary, who has come to Wrayham to buy her crossword and her name.

On Boxing Day, with the flags out and the urn on the ice, Vosper skates off alone at the last of the light to photograph a bittern. He never comes back.

The flags say he was inside the safe ice. The village says the man who set them made a mistake. Then a seventh card comes through Constance's door, in the same ruled capitals as the six before it, with a single cryptic clue, and its answer is a word for what happened to the flags.

With a boatyard owner who does her crosswords in pen and has never felt so ashamed, a detective sergeant who keeps catching herself enjoying a clue, a quizmaster whose memory is slipping and who knows more than he can say, her beloved editor up from London for the first time in a decade, and a tortoise asleep in a box in the shed, Constance must solve the cards and the ice before the thaw takes both.

Last Clue Down is the fifth and final Wrayham Staithe Mystery: a warm, witty, fairly clued British cosy with a word-loving sleuth, a slow-burn romance, a very old tortoise and absolutely no gore.

A traditional cosy mystery: no gore, no on-page violence, no explicit content.