The books

Nora Vale came home to Merrow to bury her aunt and sell the house. She did not come home to inherit the town's secrets.

Behind the flour in Constance Vale's cold pantry is a biscuit tin, and in the tin is a book: a hundred and thirty years of every wrong done in Merrow, written down and kept by the women of her family. Names. Wrongs. Prices. And a column for the paying that nobody has ever filled in.

Now the book is Nora's. The first debt to come due could clear a dead man the whole town despised, at the cost of the woman the whole town loves.

Nora spent twenty-two years in London editing other people's memoirs. She knows when a story has been tidied. What she doesn't know is whether, in a town this small, the truth is a kindness or a bill.

Wry, warm and quietly devastating, The Tin Behind the Flour is the first of the Ledger Town Mysteries: small places, long memories, and the terrible arithmetic of the truth.

The Flower and Produce Society has lost its fund, and Merrow has agreed, very politely, to say nothing about it.

Nora Vale knows who took it. The thief left an unsigned confession for her pantry, because the pantry is the one place in Merrow that holds a secret without repeating it. But the town has settled on a suspect of its own, kindly, over half-pints: Nora's sister Iris, who once kept the Society's books to the penny. Clearing her would mean breaking the one promise a keeper can't break.

Then another envelope comes through the door. It is a demand for two hundred pounds, and it quotes an entry from Nora's book, word for word.

Somebody else has read the book. And they are charging Merrow to forget it.

Marrows, committees, the Anchor's parliament in full session, and what people will pay to keep their good name: the second Ledger Town Mystery is comedy first, and then the cold.

The card is good stock, engraved, not printed. It says only C. Reisz, Weirwater Holdings, and a London address.

The offers that follow are more than fair. Merrow calls them lovely and doesn't like them one bit. Nora Vale likes them even less, because every address the stranger buys has an entry in the book she keeps behind the flour: the book nobody else is supposed to have read.

Callum Reisz never threatens and never lies. Over good tea, in daylight, he names the thing about Nora that not four living people know.

And as the nights draw in, Merrow's oldest wrongs begin to happen again, to the pound and to the night, until the town is frightened of itself.

How much does he know? What does he want? And what will it cost the people Nora has spent a year and a half protecting?

The third Ledger Town Mystery: a courteous stranger, a frightened town, and a book that was never meant to be read.

The claim runs to four hundred words on page five of the county paper: land at Merrow, 1893, a diverted river, a death and a verdict. Most of the town reads it and turns over. Nora Vale reads one phrase, the enclosure of the Rhys smallholding, and has to go and stand at the window.

Callum Reisz could win in court. He would rather the town said it out loud. So he has given Merrow a hundred days, until the Founders' Day it has never once cancelled, to find its own voice.

Nora wants to control how the truth arrives. But there is an old woman's trunk of papers nobody ever asked about, a journalist sniffing after "a town with secrets", and a warrant coming for the tin behind the flour. The book she keeps has never been in more danger.

The town splits between those who went down to look at the weir and those who were suddenly very busy. The clock is running.

The fourth Ledger Town Mystery: a village, a deadline, and what it was built on.

For two and a half years Nora Vale has carried her mother's page in her coat, until the fold went soft as cloth, and not read it properly.

One November night she lays it beside the book at last, and finds a silence where five years should be.

The one man who might know is losing his words, and Nora will not take the answer from him broken. The police file holds a single detail nobody ever mentioned. And the Anchor, which remembers everything, has decided to remember nothing, with great care.

Merrow has been careful with the Vales for thirty years. This winter, somebody forgets to be.

The fifth and final Ledger Town Mystery: a mother, a long winter, and a book that has to be closed.