Gunpowder and Green — The Thornwick Tea Shop Mysteries, Book 5

Some secrets burn longer than the fire.

Bonfire Night, 1927. For twenty-six years Major Gerald Stroud has lit the Thornwick fire on the village green — the hero of a long-ago oast-house blaze, his name in oak-leaf brass on the church wall. This year, with his torch in his hand and the rockets going up, he drops dead at the fire's edge.

The village calls it his heart. Bea Hawthorne, botanist and keeper of the Willow & Thyme tearoom, heard the wrong symptoms: a numb mouth, a racing pulse — a plant, not a heart.

But the death on the green is only the second wrong. The first is twenty-six years old and buried on the north side of the churchyard with no stone: a careful man blamed for a fire that was never his. As Bea follows a poisoned flask back through a drunk man's confession, a parish register, a widow's refused headstone and a child who grew up in plain sight, she finds the fifth of November was never a night of opportunity. It was an anniversary.

And the truth she uncovers is one the law cannot touch — and the village cannot bear to hear.

A fair-play cozy mystery of buried names, kept promises, and what a village chooses to burn.

Book 5 of The Thornwick Tea Shop Mysteries.