Twenty Lanterns

Nineteen people died in Thornby-under-Fell this year. On Lantern Night, twenty lanterns were lit.

Every Halloween since 1840, this tiny Yorkshire Dales village has carved a lantern for each soul it lost, walked them in silence to the tarn, and left them burning on the old stone wall. Ruth Penhallow has counted them for fifty years. This year, someone added one too many.

By dawn, the parish chairman is dead in the water, his flat cap sitting dry on a frosted bench. The police call it a tragedy. Ruth, who spent forty-one years as Superintendent Registrar signing the village's births, marriages and deaths, calls it something else: wrong.

Because Ruth keeps a Doubt Book, a private list of every death she never quite believed. And the twentieth lantern carries a name that should never have been written down.

As a viral video drags reporters into the Dales, Ruth starts asking quiet questions of the people she has known all her life: the village doctor, the vicar, the undertaker, the postmistress, the old solicitor who still brings claret on Thursdays. They are all kind, and all decent. And they are all hiding the same extraordinary secret.

She has ten days before the funeral to find out who went back up the fell in the dark, and what the dead man meant to confess.

A warm, witty and moving village mystery about grief, loyalty and the lies we tell to protect the people we love. Perfect for fans of clever British cosy crime, amateur sleuths with sharp minds, and autumn nights by the fire.