The Morning Men Mystery Series

In the Cornish harbour town of Porthaven, everyone knows everyone — or thinks they do.

Each morning, retired journalist Len Finch, retired builder Pete Pengelly, and former company director David Kemp meet at the same café table overlooking the harbour. They discuss weather, local politics, bad coffee, property developers, and the slow changes creeping through the town they have all, in different ways, come to love.

Then Pete's spaniel, Monty, finds a body floating beside the quay.

The dead man is Martin Morrow — a wealthy property developer whose plans for holiday lets and luxury conversions made him one of the most disliked men in Porthaven. Almost everyone seems to have a reason for wanting him gone.

As the police investigation unfolds, the three friends begin asking questions of their own. A solicitor behaving strangely. A London business partner with too much money and too little history. A widow who knows more than she's saying. And somewhere beneath it all, the uneasy sense that Martin Morrow had discovered something dangerous before he died.

Set against the windswept harbours, narrow lanes, cafés and pubs of coastal Cornwall, Death at Low Tide is a warm, intelligent mystery about the secrets small communities keep — from outsiders, and from themselves.

A woman is found dead on a country road near the Plough. She was a dog walker. She said good evening to strangers and meant it. The kind of person whose death leaves a particular kind of silence in a small community — the silence of something being unmistakably wrong.

The Morning Men have been pulling on a thread. They didn't know, when they started, where it would lead.

It has led here.

Some cases are about what happened. This one is about who was watching.

A solicitor walks into the Harbour Café and sits down at Len Finch's table. He has a client who has been in prison for five years for a murder he didn't commit.

The case looks closed. The evidence was thin, the conviction sound, the victim's family at peace. Only one thing troubles the solicitor.

The man who actually did it is still out there. And he left a trail — not a dramatic one, but the kind that rewards very close attention.

Which is, as it happens, what the Morning Men do best.