Welcome to Hollingwick.
A historic coastal town on Whitcombe Bay, where old houses keep their secrets, local history has a habit of resurfacing, and the dead are not always as quiet as they ought to be.
Sheriff Clara Holt is practical, capable and accustomed to dealing with evidence she can photograph, log and take to court. Elias Wren is rather less convenient. Murdered nearly two centuries ago and visible only to Clara, he has become her unlikely companion in a series of investigations involving strange deaths, buried histories and events that refuse to behave rationally.
Clara has the badge. Elias has memories of a Hollingwick long gone.
Between them, they may just uncover the truth.
Along the way, there are harbour streets, old buildings, local gossip, impossible clues, dry humour, small-town loyalties and a relationship neither of them expected, complicated somewhat by the fact that Clara is alive and Elias is not.
The Hollingwick Mysteries is a series of warm supernatural mystery novellas blending crime, history, ghostly intrigue, clean slow-burn romance and the life of a coastal town worth returning to.
Each novella tells a complete mystery, while Clara, Elias and Hollingwick itself continue to change from one story to the next.
In Hollingwick, the dead do not always stay quiet.
When the bell at the old Watch House rings three times before dawn, Sheriff Clara Holt is called to a body at the foot of the stairs. There is only one problem: the bell has no clapper.
Clara is used to evidence that can be photographed, logged and taken to court. Elias Wren is harder to classify. Murdered nearly two centuries ago, visible only to Clara and irritatingly opinionated about modern life, he has become her unlikely partner in the twenty-three days since he first appeared.
Clara Holt has been off duty for forty-three minutes when Hollingwick requires its sheriff again.
She had planned something unusually ordinary: an evening at the Lyric Theatre, two tickets in her pocket and the company of Elias Wren – the resident ghost she is becoming rather too accustomed to having beside her.
Then the lights go out.
In Hollingwick, the dead do not always stay quiet.
On the first hard-frost morning of November, Sheriff Clara Holt is called to Briar House when a well-known nurseryman is found dead inside a locked conservatory.
The door is bolted from the inside. The glass is frosted. And beside the body, a rose that was declared dead the day before has begun to grow.