Content notes
Before you start
Every Lost & Found book opens with a short note about what is inside it. They are here too, so you can read them before you buy. None of them gives the plot away. A fuller note at the back of each book lists what happens in detail.
The Keeper of Thimbles and Thread (prequel novella)
This is a short book about grief, and what a person will pay to be warm again. The grief is its substance, not its background.
It contains a mother’s death in fever two winters earlier, told in recollection and never staged; a father’s earlier death, mentioned; and a woman who, having lost the feeling of warmth, holds her hand on a hot range to learn whether she can feel it, and burns it.
No violence. Clean: one kiss, late, in the rain.
The romance is complete and ends happily, and its ending is chapter twenty. Chapter twenty-one stands apart from it: forty years on, an old man alone in a house, and the door into Book One.
The Keeper of Small Recoveries (Book One)
This is a novel about grief, and about what people will pay to have a piece of someone back. The grief is the substance of the book rather than its background.
It contains bereavement in several forms; a soldier’s recollection of wartime destruction and of a death in his own family, told plainly and never staged; one brief passage in which a grieving man wishes his own heart would stop; memory taken from a person by force, and memory given up by consent at a price the giver goes on paying; a parent who cannot find his own child’s face in his memory; an elderly woman’s death, following a bargain, which the keeper says plainly she hastened; a child in danger; and the courteous threats of a government ministry.
No violence is staged on the page. Clean: one kiss, late in the book, and nothing explicit anywhere.
The central romance is complete and ends happily, the two of them at home and unafraid. The mystery underneath the shop does not end, and is not meant to.
The Keeper of Bread and Bees (Book Two)
This is a novel made of grief rather than one that merely contains it: a daughter’s, seven years on and never let out, and a deception she can neither confront nor confirm.
It contains bereavement in several forms, including a mother’s death and a daughter’s unmourned grief; the discovery that a parent deliberately deceived her adult child, with nobody living who can confirm it; spousal bereavement; the death of an elderly woman shortly before the book opens, and a brief spell of not eating in the great-granddaughter who sat with her; an elderly man who has gone blind; financial hardship costed to the penny; a village’s well-meant pressure and its well-meant kindness, applied to a woman who can refuse neither; and a long friendship broken in public.
No peril and no violence on the page, though a soldier’s part in the burning of a village is stated plainly and he is serving a sentence for it. Bee stings, described. Clean to low heat: two kisses, and nothing explicit.
The central romance is complete and ends happily. The keeper and her man end the book in love and unresolved, and the mystery underneath the shop goes on.
The Keeper of Clocks and Courage (Book Three)
This is a book about being spared something you did not ask to be spared. The harm done by kindness is the substance of the book and not its background.
It contains a child who agreed, in good faith, to have a fright taken off her by untrained hands, and lost her nerve with it, and pays a real and lasting price to have it back; a village that was gentle with a frightened child, and the harm the gentleness did; a keeper who reaches for a child who has not asked, and frightens her; a schoolmistress obliged to tell the truth about a poor household, and what it costs her and them; poverty, costed to the penny; spousal bereavement, in a widower of thirty years asked to spend the peace he made out of not having her; and the courteous machinery of a government office.
No peril and no violence on the page, though a soldier is serving a sentence for his part in the burning of a village. Clean to low heat: one kiss, and nothing explicit.
The guest romance is complete and ends happily. The keeper and her man end the book in love and unresolved, and the mystery underneath the shop goes on.
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