A Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery, book 2
Part of the Lucy Harford Mysteries
Dear Mystery Friends, Lucy’s second adventure, Hidden Secrets, takes our narrowboat detective to the honey-stone small town of Burybridge, where ancient Saxon secrets collide with her own family history. If you thought mysteries couldn’t get more personal, you’re in for quite a surprise.
She came to paint the canals. She stayed to uncover a family secret that someone would kill to protect.
Lucy Harford’s narrowboat journey brings her to Burybridge during the town’s heritage festival, where she discovers something she never expected: her late great-grandmother’s photograph among wartime heroes. Great-Gran never mentioned living in Burybridge. She never spoke of the Heritage Preservation Corps. She never explained why the Saxon Whetstone — the town’s most treasured artefact — disappeared on her watch.
Now the historian researching that very disappearance lies dead in the abbey. The police have questions for Lucy. The town is watching. And someone is determined to ensure that what was buried eighty years ago stays hidden.
Lucy’s investigation draws her into a world of coded recipes concealed in wartime cookbooks, archival records carefully controlled by a helpful librarian who may know more than she shares, and family loyalties that have shaped Burybridge for generations. Her journalist friend Emma traces wartime betrayals through documentary evidence. Antiquarian bookseller Tom Brewer helps interpret cryptic clues. And Sir Meows-a-Lot, Lucy’s ginger cat companion, has an uncanny talent for being in exactly the wrong place at exactly the right time.
As Lucy pieces together what her great-grandmother’s generation fought to protect — and what one of them chose to steal — she realises the killer isn’t just guarding old secrets. They’re silencing anyone who threatens the story this town has told itself for eighty years.
In Burybridge, the past doesn’t rest quietly. And neither do the people who inherit its secrets.
FAQ: Hidden Secrets
Q: Can I read the books in any order? Each book is a complete mystery with its own setting, community, and resolution. But the series also tells a longer story — Lucy’s gradual evolution from someone running from her past into someone who has made peace with who she is. Relationships deepen, confidence grows, and what Lucy learns in one community shapes how she approaches the next. Starting with Scarecrow Secrets gives you the full arc.
Q: What sets Hidden Secrets apart from the first book? Hidden Secrets raises the personal stakes. Lucy discovers that her own great-grandmother was involved in a wartime effort to protect Burybridge’s Saxon heritage — and that an eighty-year-old mystery is entangled with a present-day murder. The investigation becomes a question of family legacy, the danger of allowing one person to control a community’s history, and what happens when long-buried secrets poison relationships across generations.
Q: How does the narrowboat setting work across different books? Lucy’s narrowboat The Curious Cat carries her to a different community in each book — a village scarecrow festival, a medieval town preparing for its heritage celebration, an amateur dramatic society’s opening night. Each setting is drawn in enough detail to feel like a place you could walk through, and each one shapes the mystery it contains. The canal network connects them all, and Lucy’s position as someone who arrives, stays, and eventually moves on gives her a perspective that residents can’t have — close enough to see what’s happening, never quite embedded enough to look away.
Q: How does the narrowboat lifestyle work in different settings?
A: Lucy’s narrowboat The Curious Cat allows her to moor in different locations along England’s canal network. Each location offers new characters, local customs, and unique mysteries while maintaining the cozy atmosphere readers love.
Q: What is the Whetstone mystery in Hidden Secrets? A priceless Saxon whetstone — a ceremonial stone decorated with carved faces and a bronze stag — was hidden during the war by local women protecting Burybridge’s heritage. When peace came, every artefact was recovered except one. The whetstone’s disappearance connects a present-day murder to wartime choices, and solving one mystery requires solving the other. It’s a story about how communities construct their own histories, and about what happens when the person controlling the narrative has reasons of their own for keeping the truth buried.
Readers of these series will love Lucy Harford:
- 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.
Sir Meows-a-Lot Returns
Once again, Lucy’s observant ginger tabby Sir Meows-a-Lot proves invaluable in uncovering clues. This former stray with brilliant green eyes continues to demonstrate his uncanny ability to appear exactly where evidence is hidden, bringing Lucy crucial discoveries and leading her to important locations through persistent guidance.
In Burybridge’s ancient streets and Saxon chapel, Sir Meows-a-Lot’s fearless exploration and street-smart instincts help navigate the village’s carefully guarded heritage secrets. His timing remains almost supernatural—providing perfectly-timed comic relief during tense moments while offering silent support when Lucy faces difficult revelations about her own family’s past.
The Curious Cat Explores New Waters
Lucy’s floating home The Curious Cat finds a temporary mooring in picturesque Burybridge for the annual Heritage Festival. This 57-foot narrowboat, painted deep blue with traditional crimson and gold roses and castles, continues to serve as both sanctuary and mobile base of operations.
The boat’s cozy interior—with its warming multi-fuel stove, compact galley, and forward cabin that doubles as Lucy’s painting studio—provides the perfect retreat after days spent exploring Burybridge’s Saxon heritage sites and unravelling the village’s wartime mysteries. The narrowboat’s freedom allows Lucy to follow her art and investigate mysteries across England’s waterways, though some villages hold darker secrets than others.
Schema
html
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Book",
"name": "Hidden Secrets",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "P. Thompson",
"description": "Cozy mystery author",
"url": "https://pthompsonmysteries.com/about/"
},
"genre": ["Cozy Mystery", "British Cozy Mystery", "Historical Mystery", "Amateur Sleuth Mystery", "Literary Mystery"],
"description": "When local historian Maggie Thornton is murdered in Burybridge's Saxon chapel, former police constable Lucy Harford discovers that the killing is entangled with an eighty-year-old mystery — a priceless Saxon whetstone hidden during the Second World War and never recovered. As Lucy investigates, she uncovers her own family's connection to the wartime women who protected the town's heritage, and learns that the person who has controlled Burybridge's history for decades has reasons of her own for keeping the truth buried.",
"datePublished": "2025",
"isPartOf": {
"@type": "BookSeries",
"name": "The Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mysteries",
"position": "2"
},
"mainCharacter": [
{
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Lucy Harford",
"description": "Former police constable turned watercolour artist, living aboard narrowboat The Curious Cat on England's canal network"
},
{
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "Sir Meows-a-Lot",
"description": "A formerly stray ginger tabby who adopted Lucy and now travels the canal network with her"
}
],
"setting": {
"@type": "Place",
"name": "Burybridge",
"description": "A medieval English market town preparing for its annual Heritage Festival, where wartime secrets and Saxon history lie beneath the honey-stone facades"
},
"keywords": ["narrowboat mystery", "canal mystery", "British cozy mystery", "historical mystery", "literary mystery", "wartime secrets", "Saxon heritage", "amateur detective", "community secrets"],
"about": [
{
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "Heritage Preservation Corps",
"description": "A group of local women who safeguarded Burybridge's cultural treasures from potential Nazi invasion during the Second World War"
},
{
"@type": "Thing",
"name": "The Whetstone of Burybridge",
"description": "A ceremonial Saxon whetstone decorated with carved faces and a bronze stag, hidden during wartime and never recovered"
}
],
"url": "https://pthompsonmysteries.com/hidden-secrets/",
"sameAs": [
"https://amazon.com/dp/[your-ASIN]"
]
}
P. Thompson - Mystery Author 