A Stitch in Time, A Knot in Crime

She can read a village the way she reads a pattern — one thread at a time.

Penny Croft has spent eight quiet years behind the counter of The Yarn & Needle, where the news arrives with the morning customers and the worst crime in Meadowbrook is a cat that wandered into the vestry.

Then Silas Blackwood, the reclusive owner of the Lavender Lane Bookshop, is found dead at the foot of his own stepladder.

The constable calls it an accident.

Penny finds a button.

It isn’t hers. It isn’t Silas’s. And in a village where she has sold buttons to every soul for eight years, it doesn’t match a single thing she has ever stocked.

With Eleanor Finch — a retired Oxford librarian with a memory like a card catalogue — and Gareth Davies, the baker who hears everything worth hearing, Penny begins to pull at a thread running beneath Meadowbrook’s cobbles.

A ledger written in cipher. A first edition that has quietly vanished.

And the scent of lavender in a room where no lavender grows.

Someone in this village killed for a book.

And they are still buying wool on Tuesdays.

A Stitch in Time, A Knot in Crime is the first Yarn & Needle Mystery — a warm, traditional English village whodunit for readers who love Miss Marple, tea by the fire, and a puzzle that plays fair.

Inside you’ll find:

A shop-owner sleuth who solves by listening, not by chasing

A closed circle of suspects and clues you can genuinely spot

Three friends worth settling in with for a whole series No gore, no explicit content, no cliffhanger —

the case closes A village you will want to move to Pull the first thread. Scroll up and grab your copy.