The mystery
A whodunit that plays fair
The clues are all there. No last-chapter evidence, no murderer produced from behind a curtain. You can solve it before Iris does, if you're paying attention.
Chipping Cottam is a devout little village where the gods are thanked at every doorstep, everyone knows everyone else's business, and murder is unheard of.
Until the Warden of the Hall of Shrines turns up dead.
Iris Vane, the village postmistress, was blessed by a god with a flawless memory. She never forgets a face, a conversation, or a lie told badly enough to contradict itself, which makes her invaluable when Theodore Parker, a sharp, flirtatious, and irritatingly handsome Crown Investigator, arrives from the city and recruits her into the case.
Unfortunately, Parker is keeping secrets.
So is Iris.
Hers are carefully buried and tied to the gods themselves. As the investigation uncovers affairs, missing money, old grudges, and respectable people behaving very badly, Iris and Parker grow dangerously close to the truth, and to each other.
Fast, funny, and genuinely dark: a fantasy mystery that plays fair, and a romance that absolutely does not.
Why readers love it
Everything you came to this genre for
The romance
Slow burn, then high heat
For a good while, they have a murder to solve and several reasons not to sleep together. Eventually, these reasons prove insufficient.
It gets explicit. Consent is part of the scene.
The setting
A village, not a fae court
No thrones. No royal courts. No prophecy requiring a nineteen-year-old to save the world.
Just gaslight, gossip, respectable neighbours behaving suspiciously, gods meddling from a careful distance, and perhaps the occasional demon.
The friendship
Iris and Miriam
They gossip. They investigate. They interfere in each other's lives with complete confidence that this is what friendship is for.
They are fiercely loyal, occasionally appalling, and very funny together.
The women
Nobody is waiting to be rescued
Iris solves her own case, guards her own secrets, and refuses to be anyone's prize. The women here rescue themselves, and each other.
The voice
Dark and very funny at once
A wickedly dry narrator who will make you laugh a page before she breaks your heart, at a pace that does not let up.
Advance readers
Read it before anyone else
I'm putting together a small ARC team: readers who receive a free advance copy ahead of release and post an honest review when the book goes live. If you love a fair-play mystery and a romance that earns its heat, I'd love to have you.
- A free advance copy (ebook), sent out ahead of publication.
- In return, an honest review around release day, wherever you post them.
- Adult content, 18+ only. This is dark, high-heat fiction (full content notes further down).
Questions first? Email me here.
“If any god still remembers this village, he has kept remarkably quiet about it.”Iris Vane, postmistress of Chipping Cottam
Who you'll be spending time with
The people of Chipping Cottam
Iris Vane
The postmistress
Gifted with a perfect memory and cursed with the past it won't let her forget. Dry, unflinching, and nobody's fool.
Theodore Parker
The investigator
Sent from the city to solve the murder. Flirtatious, far too handsome, precise about everything except himself.
Miriam Bellamy
The best friend
Iris's oldest friend and the village's finest gossip. Sharper than she lets on, and the beating heart of the book.
A taste of the voice
The first page
Chapter One
Josiah Meeks died on his knees. He was found two days ago at the centre of the Hall of Shrines, slumped face-down in the basin of holy water. Drowned, they said. A remarkable feat, given the basin was barely two spans deep.
Someone helped, it seems. Held him there until the bubbles stopped.
“Horrible! Devastating news for the whole village!” Miriam, my oldest friend, was enjoying herself enormously. The first notable thing to happen in Chipping Cottam in a decade, and she’d got to it before the papers. “A pillar of our society! Murdered!”
A pillar whose death was proving, for many people, an awkward thing to disapprove of.
For thirty years, Meeks had served his community as Warden of the Hall of Shrines, the most esteemed, and very nearly the most powerful, position in the village, for whatever that’s worth. A Warden’s word is next to the gods’ own. For thirty years, Meeks dispensed his opinion on everyone else’s character: an engagement ended here, an apprenticeship refused there, a family gently starved of invitations. He buried more reputations than parishioners.
For readers of…
The Tainted Cup
Robert Jackson Bennett
A clue-driven fantasy whodunit led by an investigator whose gift is her memory.
Alchemised
SenLinYu
An obsessive, morally grey love interest, and the heat level that comes with him.
Complete at 109,000 words, told in dual POV. First in a planned series.
Before you begin
Content notes
Read the content warnings +
This is a dark, high-heat romantasy for adult readers. It contains graphic violence, on-page murder and torture, domestic and child abuse, a forced abortion, a beating that causes serious injury, pregnancy loss, animal cruelty, and explicit sexual content.
The central romance involves obsessive and possessive behaviour, deception, and a significant power imbalance, all of which the book raises as problems rather than treating as romantic. A fuller, chapter-by-chapter list is available on request.
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