Treggan Bay is the kind of place where everyone knows who has keys to what. In May 1996, a body on the village library floor turns a simmering dispute into a reckoning.

London journalist Noah Yalland returns to South Devon to clear his late mother’s cliff-top cottage, planning to sell and go. The Landmark Syndicate’s proposed waterside villas have already split neighbours; when their envoy, Frank Cullen, is found bludgeoned, suspicion falls on the locals who challenged him the night before.

Eileen Thorne—village librarian and former registrar—sees her quiet order upended as Sergeant Scott Langdon starts asking sharp questions. Noah, who had his own run-in with Cullen, is suddenly far more than a witness.

This is a pre-digital mystery: answers live in parish registers, council minutes, sign-in books, and remembered alibis. Noah wants to do right by his father and keep Leo, the new café owner, out of the developers’ crosshairs… even as long-buried records, generational feuds, and a growing pull towards Leo complicate every choice.

With gossip moving faster than facts and the bay’s future on the line, can the truth surface before the wrong person pays—or before the deal becomes impossible to stop?

A cosy, character-led coastal whodunnit with fair-play cluework, found family, and a queer slow burn (fade-to-black intimacy). First in the Treggan Bay Mysteries; reads cleanly as a standalone.