A Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery, book 1

Part of the Lucy Harford Mysteries

Dear Mystery Friends, I’m thrilled to share Lucy’s first adventure with you! If you love the idea of solving mysteries while floating through England’s most beautiful countryside, and exploring charming villages this is the book for you.

She came looking for peace. She found a body staged among the scarecrows.

When former police constable Lucy Harford moors her narrowboat The Curious Cat in Lower Wick, she’s hoping for nothing more than quiet days of painting and a village worth sketching. The annual Scarecrow Festival should be the perfect backdrop — bunting and craft stalls, Morris dancers on the green, and whimsical figures standing sentry in every garden.

Then Lucy discovers the vicar’s body displayed among them, and the idyllic village she arrived in becomes something far more complicated.

Lower Wick is a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business — or thinks they do. Beneath the festival cheer lie decades of buried grudges: a bitter dispute over land and housing, a broken engagement that still poisons two families thirty years on, and a mysterious letter that has ended up where it shouldn’t be. The vicar, it turns out, had a talent for involving himself in other people’s pain. Not everyone is sorry he’s gone.

Lucy wants no part of an investigation. But her police training won’t let her unsee what she’s noticed, and her artist’s eye keeps catching details others miss. With the help of Emma Thatch, a local journalist whose curiosity matches her own, and Sir Meows-a-Lot, a stray ginger cat who has decided that Lucy belongs to him, she begins to trace the connections between grief, guilt, and a community fracturing under the weight of its own secrets.

In Lower Wick, the scarecrows aren’t the only things keeping watch. And the person responsible for the vicar’s death may not be finished.

The first book in the Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mysteries — for readers who love the village warmth of Ann Cleeves, the atmospheric puzzles of Elly Griffiths, and mysteries where the community is as rich as the crime.

Meet Lucy Harford

Former police constable Lucy Harford traded her badge for paintbrushes and now lives aboard her narrowboat The Curious Cat, travelling England’s waterways as a full-time artist. A career-ending injury forced Lucy from police work, but her keen observational skills and methodical mind haven’t dimmed. Her empathetic nature helps her connect with people and encourages them to share their secrets—a talent that proves invaluable when mysteries arise in the villages where she moors. Accompanied by her observant ginger cat Sir Meows-a-Lot, Lucy discovers that some habits are harder to leave behind than a police uniform, and her investigative instincts have a way of drawing her into danger despite her desire for a quiet life

Sir Meows-a-Lot

Meet Lucy’s unofficial detective partner: a bright ginger tabby with brilliant green eyes and an uncanny knack for appearing exactly where clues are hidden. This former stray chose Lucy as much as she chose him, recognising a kindred independent spirit. Sir Meows-a-Lot has adapted to narrowboat life with remarkable ease, treating The Curious Cat as his domain. He provides both clues and perfectly-timed comic relief during tense moments as well as offering silent support when Lucy needs it most.

If you enjoy these writers, you may feel at home here

Louise Penny’s Three Pines novels — Communities that feel lived-in, characters whose complexity rewards attention, and mysteries where understanding why matters as much as discovering who. Penny proved that a small village can contain the whole world. Lucy’s canal communities work in the same tradition — intimate settings where murder reveals what was always there beneath the surface.

Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series — A protagonist whose professional skills are inseparable from how she sees the world, settings that carry real atmospheric weight, and mysteries grounded in place and history. Like Ruth, Lucy solves crimes through the specific way she observes — in Lucy’s case, an artist’s eye trained to notice what others overlook.

Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope novels — Landscapes that shape the stories told within them, communities bound by loyalty and silence in equal measure, and an investigator who reads people as carefully as evidence. Lucy shares Vera’s patience and her understanding that the truth about a crime is usually tangled up in the truth about a community.

You’ll especially enjoy these mysteries if you’re drawn to:

Stories where the setting does real work — not just charming backdrop but a living world that shapes how people behave, what they hide, and what they’re willing to protect. Mysteries solved through intelligence, observation, and genuine understanding of people rather than violence or lucky breaks. Characters who carry their histories with them — whose motives, secrets, and contradictions make them feel like people you might actually know. The satisfaction of a fair puzzle where every clue was visible, combined with the deeper satisfaction of a story that lingers after the last page.

Start with Scarecrow Secrets, where Lucy moors The Curious Cat in a village preparing for its annual festival — and discovers that the most picturesque places can harbour the most human darkness.

Where to buy

Scarecrow Secrets is available on Amazon in both eBook and paperback formats. Whether you prefer reading on your device or holding a physical book, you can join Lucy and Sir Meows-a-Lot on their first mystery adventure.

The books can be read in any order, but in the series, the next one is Hidden Secrets – where Lucy’s own past becomes the most dangerous mystery of all.

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