The Morning Men Mystery Series

Every morning, rain or shine, Pete walks his dog along the Porthaven harbour wall before the town properly wakes. It is the steadiest part of his week — steadier, some mornings, than visiting his wife, who no longer always knows him.

Then Monty finds a body on the tideline, and the morning stops being steady at all.

The dead man had plans for Porthaven that not everyone welcomed, and more than a few people had reason to want him gone. Detective Inspector Karen Locke, newly arrived and still finding her feet in a place where everyone already knows everyone, has a harbour full of suspects and no shortage of people telling her what she should think.

Pete, Len and David have no jurisdiction, no training, and rather more time on their hands than they used to. What they have instead is years of knowing this town and each other — and an unsettling gift for noticing exactly the things people would prefer stayed unnoticed.

The first Morning Men Mystery, for readers who like their crime fiction warm enough to sit with and sharp enough to trust.

A woman goes into the sea at Trevone one morning and doesn't come out again. The coastguard calls it a tragedy. Nobody in Porthaven quite believes that's all it was.

Pete, Len and David didn't know her well — Porthaven is smaller than it looks on a map, but not that small — and yet each of them finds they knew rather more than they realised, in the way a small town teaches you things about people without ever quite meaning to.

Detective Inspector Karen Locke is back, with Detective Sergeant Neil Trenowden at her side and a case that keeps circling back to things people said years ago and never expected anyone to remember. The Morning Men remember. That has always been rather the point of them.

For readers who came to Porthaven for the harbour and the company, and are starting to realise the town holds more than either.

There is a name the Morning Men have been quietly chasing since the last case closed — one word on David's whiteboard, unresolved and unignorable. This time they go looking for it on purpose.

What they find first is a body.

A woman out walking her dog late one night, in the car park behind the Harrow Inn, long after the pub has closed for the evening. Nobody can quite say why she was there, or who she might have seen. Detective Sergeant Neil Trenowden finds himself caught between what he's told to do and what he knows is right, while Detective Inspector Karen Locke is close — closer than she's ever been — to the thing that has been sitting just out of reach since she arrived in Porthaven.

For Pete, Len and David, this is no longer a case that found them. It's the one they went looking for.

A third Morning Men Mystery for readers who've been waiting to see where that one loose thread finally leads.

Nataliya has spent three years building a life at the Windsor Hotel — small, quiet, entirely her own. Then a man checks in for a wedding, and she recognises him before he ever sees her face.

By morning, she's gone.

There is no body this time. What there is instead is a woman who has run before and knows how to disappear, a man with more money than conscience, and very little time. Finding her turns out to be the easier part. Keeping her safe is what the rest of this book is about.

And in the background, quietly, something else is taking shape. David finds a name, a connection, a financial trail that doesn't yet make sense. He's seen something like it before. This time, he knows enough to be worried.

A fourth Morning Men Mystery — quieter than the others, and no less urgent for it.

Duncan Mackinnon has spent five years in prison for his brother's murder. He has always said he didn't do it. Nobody, until now, has been paid to listen.

When a solicitor writes to Len — an old habit dying hard, an old instinct never quite gone — he finds a witness nobody interviewed, a timeline nobody checked closely enough, and a case that was allowed to close rather than solved.

For Len, this is personal in a way the others haven't been. He knows what it costs to get a story wrong, and what it costs more to get it right too late. Pete and David follow him into it, and what they find is a dead man whose real killer was never even considered — because Porthaven had already decided who to believe.

A fifth Morning Men Mystery, and Len's book at last.

Winter comes hard this year. The harbour empties, the storms don't let up, and Porthaven pulls in on itself the way small towns do when the weather turns — fewer faces at the window table, longer silences between them.

Then the sea gives something back.

A body, and cargo that finally says plainly what five books of careful men have only been able to circle. For David, it's the whiteboard clear for the first time in longer than he can easily remember. For Karen, it's the case she came to Cornwall to be allowed to finish properly.

For Pete, it's something else entirely. A face from fifty years ago that was never supposed to surface again, and a version of his own past he has been carrying wrong the whole time without knowing it.

The sixth and final Morning Men Mystery.