Towpath Secrets, the fourth Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery, moors up this July.

Lucy Harford has spent the better part of two years on the water now, and she has learned to read a place before she has driven in the second pin. Barrow Reach looks, on that first evening, like everything she came to the canals to find. A straight run of water in an early, dry May. A single stone arch holding the middle distance the way a good bridge does. A great house half-screened behind willows on the far bank, and a pub sign swinging in and out of sight beyond the arch. Walking distance. Good walking distance for an evening.

The engine went to neutral and the tiller stopped vibrating under her palm. Lucy let The Curious Cat coast the last yard and a half with the bow swinging slow and deliberate toward the bank, and she stepped off the narrowboat onto the grass verge with the stern rope already paying out of her left hand. Almost two years of this. Her body had stopped thinking about it by the end of the first summer.

Barrow Reach is a settled little world: a handful of liveaboard boats along the towpath, a welcoming pub across the water, a hamlet up the lane, and Barrow Court standing behind its formal garden as it has stood for a very long time. Then a death under the bridge turns the warmth of the place inside out.

What follows is an investigation that runs not through forensics but through a different sort of evidence, through the slow unpicking of who a person really was and who they were allowed to become. The community that took Lucy in begins to show its seams. And, as ever in these books, the truth, when it arrives, is less about how someone died than about why.

If you have read Scarecrow Secrets, Hidden Secrets, or Theatre Secrets, you already know the pattern: a puzzle solved fairly, by observation and a genuine understanding of people rather than by violence; a community that fractures under pressure and finds its way back to some changed version of itself; warmth and weight held together without either cancelling the other. And if this is your first time aboard The Curious Cat, Towpath Secrets stands entirely on its own. Barrow Reach is its own complete world, and you are very welcome to begin here.

Towpath Secrets publishes in late July 2026, in ebook and paperback.

The first three Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mysteries are available now — Scarecrow Secrets, Hidden Secrets, and Theatre Secrets — and for those already looking down the cut, Lucy’s fifth outing, Valley Secrets, is on its way.

You can find all the books, and news as it comes, at pthompsonmysteries.com.

I look forward to seeing you at Barrow Reach.

P. Thompson