The novels of P. Thompson

The puzzle is who.
The story is why.

A canal-boat painter, a ginger cat, and the still green water of England’s waterways. The Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mysteries — all of them in Kindle Unlimited.

Meet Lucy Harford Free Story

Underneath these crimes is an accumulation of small hurts, old loyalties and quiet choices that led an ordinary person to an unthinkable act. These are mysteries solved by attention and understanding rather than force, in communities that feel real, with people you'll come to know before you learn what they've done.

You'll solve the puzzle. You'll also feel the weight of it — the warmth and the cost, held together.

The books, in more detail

Each one stands on its own.

Scarecrow SecretsA Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery, book 1

Lucy Harford moors her narrowboat at the village of Lower Wick expecting nothing more than a quiet week of painting and the annual Scarecrow Festival. Then she finds the vicar’s body staged among the scarecrows. Beneath the bunting lie grudges: a bitter dispute over land, a broken engagement two families still nurse, and a letter that ended up where it shouldn’t. A warm English village cosy mystery, solved by an artist’s eye rather than a warrant.

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Hidden SecretsA Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery, book 2

The canal brings Lucy to the English market town of Burybridge during its heritage festival, where she finds the historian researching the town’s most famous theft lying dead in the abbey. She also discovers her late great-grandmother’s face in a photograph of wartime heroes, a family story she never knew but one bound up with the murder. Coded recipes, carefully guarded archives and eighty years of family loyalty stand between Lucy and the truth. A layered cosy mystery about what a town chooses to remember.

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Theatre SecretsA Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery, book 3

A commission to paint Stavewell’s crumbling Victorian playhouse gives Lucy the run of the building: the ironwork ceiling, the backstage passages, the fly gallery where the counterweights hang in the dark above the wings. On opening night, someone dies beneath them. The police read it as a terrible accident. Lucy, who draws only what is actually there, sees a company tangled in old rivalries — and a scene that doesn’t hang right.

Read Theatre Secrets on Amazon →

Towpath SecretsA Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery, book 4

Lucy arrives at the canal-side hamlet of Barrow Reach on a fine May evening, wanting good light and a quiet mooring. She gets both, and a body in the water under the bridge near the pub. Carol Marsh had spent a week in the Bargeman’s Rest talking with locals, looking at old photographs and asking questions, and everyone had noticed but no one had said. As the police work the case, Lucy notices the things a close community would rather nobody looked at twice.

Read Towpath Secrets on Amazon →

More is on its way

Another place, another community with something it would rather keep quiet — and the same patient attention to what people don't say aloud. Join the Mystery Circle — my reader email list — and you'll hear it first.

The Mystery Circle

Begin with a free story

The Mystery Circle is simply my reader email list — and this is where you join it. Leave your address below and Lock Gate Secrets arrives straight away: a Lucy Harford mystery that's yours to keep, and isn't sold anywhere. After that, first word of every new book and series to come.

One sign-up. The free story is the Mystery Circle.

Cover of Lock Gate Secrets, a free Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery prequel novella by P. Thompson

Lock Gate Secrets

A prequel novella · free · found nowhere else

The earliest story in Lucy’s life, and the most recent one I’ve written: before the boat, before the cat, while she was still a serving officer — the case where she first paints a scene without knowing what she has recorded. The truest sample of where the series is going.

A few emails a year. No noise, no clutter — leave whenever you like. Your address is used for the Mystery Circle and nothing else: privacy notice.

Two swans on a still canal at dusk, narrowboats moored either side

The Author

P. Thompson

I came to mystery writing through years of listening — work that meant being alongside people during the most difficult moments of their lives, sitting with grief, navigating conflict, watching the complicated ways communities hold together and fall apart. That experience shapes every book: people are rarely simple, motives are rarely clean, and the most interesting truths are usually the ones nobody is saying aloud.

I wrote Lucy Harford because I wanted mysteries where the puzzle is satisfying and the people caught up in it feel real. Lucy is a former police constable turned narrowboat painter who travels England's canal network with her companion Sir Meows-a-Lot — a formerly stray ginger cat with impeccable timing and questionable respect for boundaries. She has an artist's eye for detail, a detective's instinct for the things people would rather keep hidden, and a sense of justice that won't let her walk away.

The communities Lucy passes through are warm and complicated in equal measure, and the stories ask questions that linger — about how we remake ourselves after loss, what we owe each other, and what happens when the secrets a community has been keeping finally surface.

Readers are always welcome to write: hello@pthompsonmysteries.com. Every message reaches me.