The Hidden Word

He promised to reveal the word hidden in his new book. He never got the chance.

Dr Constance Larwood has agreed to sit on the crossword panel at the Wrayham Staithe Book Festival, as the parish magazine's setter and nothing grander. By four o'clock on Saturday the whole marquee knows she is Bittern, the setter half the country does at the weekend, and she would very much like to go home.

The festival's star guest is Anselm Brightwell, Norfolk-born, back where he began: a memoirist who has opened every chapter of four books with a date, and has never been wrong about one. His new book is different. There is a word hidden in it, he tells the festival, and tomorrow at noon he will say it aloud.

That evening he collapses in the vestry before his reading. His allergy was well known. His pens were in his car, just as the hospitality sheet said. The village calls it a terrible accident.

But Constance saw those pens an hour before, and she has read the first page of his typescript, and she knows that a man who never wastes a word does not choose his first ones by chance.

With a boatyard owner who does her crosswords in pen, a detective sergeant who is no longer the only one allowed to know who Bittern is, a quizmaster who corrects everyone in print, and a tortoise who walks away from people he does not like (very slowly), Constance must read a dead man's book the way only a setter would.

The Hidden Word is the third 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.