Murder on the Lockkeeper's Canal

About this book:

The mist-shrouded canals of the Grand Union cut have kept their secrets for centuries—until a body in a thousand-pound coat surfaces at Lock Number Nine, a silver pocket watch frozen at 2:03 clutched in his strangled hand. For Arthur Ward, the lockkeeper who rules this damp, ivy-choked kingdom with three decades of silence and routine, the murder is an insult to his sovereignty. For DI Jack Logan, a city detective with ruinous shoes and zero patience for rural eccentricity, it’s a logistical nightmare in a place where the only roads are water and the only witnesses are reeds.

Thrown together by a crime that defies the canal’s slow logic, the two men circle each other with the wariness of rival barge horses: Arthur, who reads the water like scripture and guards his stretch with obstinate pride; Logan, who brings forensics, procedure, and a migraine-inducing suspicion that the killer knows these waters better than either of them. As the investigation drags them from the industrial shadows of the old brickworks to the deceptive charm of holiday narrowboats, every clue pulls them deeper into a community where everyone has a mooring, everyone has a motive, and the current never forgets what it’s swallowed.

Atmospheric, sharply plotted, and alive with the gritty poetry of Britain’s forgotten waterways, *Murder on the Lockkeeper’s Canal* launches a riveting new crime series where the landscape is as treacherous as the suspects—and the partnership between a stubborn lockkeeper and a weary detective might be the only thing that keeps them afloat.