One Across, One Dead

A farewell note. A word he would never have used. And a village that would rather not ask who did.

Dr Constance Larwood spent twenty-six years deciding what English words mean, until her dictionary went online and let her go. Now she sets cryptic crosswords under a bird's name, from a reed-thatched cottage on the Norfolk Broads that came with a condition: a seventy-year-old tortoise called Fowler, to be cared for "for the remainder of his natural life, which may well exceed her own."

Wrayham Staithe settles its quarrels in the parish magazine and on quiz night, and the fiercest letter writer of all is Hector Quarles, retired solicitor, who sails his dinghy out across the Broad at midnight every Midsummer Eve to toast his late wife.

This year, the dinghy comes back upside down.

The note on his desk says he could see no other way, and his bank statements agree. But Constance has read forty years of Hector's letters. He mocked one word in every one of them. And there it is, in the middle of his last.

With a boatyard owner who does her crosswords in pen, a quizmaster who corrects her in print, a detective sergeant who is a little too thrilled to meet a real crossword setter, and a tortoise who walks away from people he does not like (very slowly), Constance has to find out who put the words in a dead man's mouth.

One Across, One Dead is the first 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.