The Lost & Found
The books
Standalone cosy fantasy romances set in Ashthorn, a wet fishing village at the end of the only road. Each is a complete love story. The mystery under the shop runs through them all.
A prequel novella · Free
The Keeper of Thimbles and Thread
The bell rang before he had the door open. The woman next door had the key, and no intention of handing it over.
Halligan has spent twenty-two years as the second pair of hands in another keeper’s shop. Now a letter from the Road has sent him to Ashthorn to keep the Lost and Found: the little shop where people bring what grief has taken from them, and pay for its return with the one thing they can least bear to give.
Enid Pryor keeps the draper’s next door. She has her tea at eleven and at four, she measures a room by eye, and she watched her mother pay for a recovery once and come home less. She also has not felt the warmth of a fire in two winters. He sees it on her in the first minute on the step, and by the rule his craft keeps above every other, he cannot say so until she asks.
Book One · Out now
The Keeper of Small Recoveries
Some things are lost. Some things are only mislaid.
Isolde Vance was the youngest royal keeper in two hundred years, until she was framed for a crime of memory she can’t even remember, stripped of her name, and exiled to run a dead man’s shuttered shop at the far end of the kingdom. She means to clear her name and leave. She does not mean to stay, to care, or to reopen the Lost & Found.
She certainly doesn’t mean to fall for the man the Crown sent to watch her. Rook Harrowgate is a soldier serving out a penance sentence at her side, all blunt silences and careful hands and a grief he won’t name. And as they mend one small heartbreak at a time, the shop begins to mend them.
But something is unravelling the kingdom’s memory, village by village, and the forgetting has followed Isolde to the end of the world.
Book Two · Out now
The Keeper of Bread and Bees
Some things are written down. Some things were only ever in the hands.
Bess Tapper is Ashthorn’s baker, and for the seven years since her mother died she has baked her mother’s harvest loaf wrong. The method is on a paper above her trough, in her own hand, correct in every particular. It has never once made the loaf.
The Lost & Found can find what Bess has lost, but Isolde Vance cannot make it cheap. Nothing comes back for nothing, and to bake like her mother again Bess will have to give up the sight of her mother’s hands.
Then, eleven years after he went off on the winter road, Corin Meade comes back into Ashthorn with three skeps on a handcart. They had the banns set once. The whole village remembers.
Book Three · Out now
The Keeper of Clocks and Courage
Some things are lost. Some are taken by somebody who meant nothing but well.
Gideon Orme can mend anything with a movement in it. What he cannot do is get to the end of a sentence in a room with people in it, and he has counted the words of everything he has ever not said to the assistant schoolmistress at the top of the lane.
Kitty Fenner is nine. Last winter a kind woman took the fright off her with untrained hands, and nobody noticed what went with it. Isolde can see what came off that child, whole and eight months old, and she can get it back. But the shop has one law: out loud, or it is not given.
The harm done by kindness is the substance of this book, not its background.