The Winter Raven

In the winter shadows of Boscastle, a ship appears through the storm.

Its captain, Elias Teach, is a thief, a killer and a pirate hunted by the Crown. To those who fear his name, he is something else entirely: the Winter Raven.

He comes ashore intending to rob the isolated Cornish harbour of everything worth taking.

Then he looks up at a whitewashed house and sees Anne Penrose watching him from a window.

Anne knows what kind of man has arrived in her town. She sees the pistols, the armed crew and the fear Elias brings with him. She knows people have died because of men like him. Yet when their eyes meet across the winter darkness, she does something neither of them will ever forget.

She puts out her candle.

Elias leaves Boscastle, but he cannot leave Anne behind.

Winter after winter, he returns.

What begins with suspicion and dangerous fascination slowly becomes something neither of them expected: a love built in stolen hours between voyages, naval pursuit and the constant knowledge that Elias may one day sail away and never return.

Anne refuses to pretend that loving him makes him innocent. Elias cannot erase the bloodshed of his past. But for the first time in his life, the notorious pirate begins to imagine something more valuable than gold: an ordinary home, horses in a stable, rosemary beside the kitchen door, children perhaps, and mornings in which no one is hunting him.

Beneath the floorboards of a Boscastle house, four iron-bound chests hold enough stolen treasure to make that future possible.

If Elias can survive long enough to reach it.

As old enemies betray him and the Royal Navy closes its net, Elias must choose between the life that made him feared and the woman who has shown him another way to live. Anne, meanwhile, must decide what it truly means to love a man whose crimes cannot simply be forgiven because he loves her in return.

But the sea remembers.

And Boscastle has a long memory of its own.

Years later, people will tell of mysterious footprints appearing whenever snow covers the Cornish cliffs: a single trail leading from a white house towards the sea, with no footprints ever coming back.

They will tell of a pirate, a woman who loved him, and the winter that claimed them both.

But legends have a habit of making the truth tidier than it really was.

Set against the wild beauty of eighteenth-century Cornwall, The Winter Raven: The Pirate of Boscastle Bay is a sweeping historical romance of piracy, danger, humour, sacrifice, grief and the extraordinary things people will risk for the chance of an ordinary life.

Because some treasures are buried.

Some stories become legends.

And some things are worth coming home for.