Leaf Fall at Lock Six

The water says six o'clock. The phone call says ten. Someone is counting on nobody knowing the difference. Autumn leaves are choking the Sedgeworth Flight, the clocks are about to go back, and seventy-nine-year-old Thurstan Pickersgill has reluctantly accepted an electric tricycle. His friends consider this progress. Thurstan has his doubts. Then the town's most unpopular developer is found dead at the bottom of a warehouse hoist shaft beside Lock Six. The basement is flooded. The pump is off. And Saskia Holroyd's finance director swears he spoke to her at ten o'clock that night. But Thurstan knows that basement. He has watched canal water seep into it for fifty years: one inch an hour once the pump stops. The water in the shaft puts that moment at six. Who answered Saskia's phone four hours later? He also knows something the town never guessed about the woman it loved to hate. Saskia was born at Low Wharf. She had come home looking for the truth about the night the bank burst in 1981—and someone may have killed her for finding it. With the Monday Puzzle Club drawn into the investigation, Thurstan must follow the rising water back to a night Sedgeworth has spent decades trying to forget. But the secrets waiting there belong to people he loves. And some belong to him. To find Saskia's killer, the old keeper will have to ask his friends for the truth—and decide how much of his own he is prepared to tell. Leaf Fall at Lock Six is Book Eight in the Monday Puzzle Club Mystery series—a warm, wry autumn mystery of old loyalties, difficult confessions and forgiveness among the narrowboats and lock cottages of a Midlands canal town. A clean cozy mystery with a complete fair-play solution, no graphic content and no bad language.