Scarecrow Secrets (Lucy Harford, #1)

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 the quaint English village of Lower Wick, she’s hoping for nothing more than quiet days of painting and a place 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, 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.

Scarecrow Secrets is the first book in the Lucy Harford Narrowboat Mystery series. Each book works as a standalone mystery.