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The Wrong Catch: A Cornish Coastal Cozy Mystery with Village Secrets, an Amateur Sleuth, and a Moral Twist
A cut rope.
A swapped compass.
A drink, quietly spiked on a Tuesday evening at the local pub.
None of them were meant to kill him. Every single one of them did.
Botanical illustrator Nora Crane arrives at the impossibly charming Cornish fishing village of Porth Cador for a six-week commission and absolutely no intention of investigating anything. She just wants sea air, wildflowers to draw, and six weeks of not thinking about her divorce.
But Danny Trewin — the returned local drowned in April after his boat went out in a storm — keeps coming up in conversations that stop just a little too quickly. His nineteen-year-old daughter is staying in the cottage next door. The harbourmaster's accident report has one very small, very convenient gap in it.
Nora can't let a wrong answer stand. She never could.
What she uncovers isn't quite a murder. Three people. Three separate acts of sabotage, each one designed only to silence a man who knew too much, each one individually deniable. In combination, on a stormy April night, with a compromised boat, they became something none of them intended.
And behind all of a twenty-year-old secret pulled up from the seabed on the wrong night — something the sea had been keeping for two decades and had decided, without ceremony, to give back.
The Wrong Catch is a gripping, morally complex cozy mystery set on the Cornish coast — where the village is warm, the conspiracy was accidental, and the hardest question isn't who did it. It's what you do when nobody murdered him and everybody did.
Perfect for fans of Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves, and Janice Hallett.
✔️ Cornish & Coastal Setting
✔️ Cozy Mystery
✔️ Amateur Female Sleuth
✔️ No Single Villain — Everyone Did It
✔️ Morally Ambiguous Ending
✔️ Small Town & Village Secrets
✔️ Book Club Fiction
✔️ British Mystery
✔️ Slow Burn Investigation
✔️ Twenty-Year-Old Cold Case
A swapped compass.
A drink, quietly spiked on a Tuesday evening at the local pub.
None of them were meant to kill him. Every single one of them did.
Botanical illustrator Nora Crane arrives at the impossibly charming Cornish fishing village of Porth Cador for a six-week commission and absolutely no intention of investigating anything. She just wants sea air, wildflowers to draw, and six weeks of not thinking about her divorce.
But Danny Trewin — the returned local drowned in April after his boat went out in a storm — keeps coming up in conversations that stop just a little too quickly. His nineteen-year-old daughter is staying in the cottage next door. The harbourmaster's accident report has one very small, very convenient gap in it.
Nora can't let a wrong answer stand. She never could.
What she uncovers isn't quite a murder. Three people. Three separate acts of sabotage, each one designed only to silence a man who knew too much, each one individually deniable. In combination, on a stormy April night, with a compromised boat, they became something none of them intended.
And behind all of a twenty-year-old secret pulled up from the seabed on the wrong night — something the sea had been keeping for two decades and had decided, without ceremony, to give back.
The Wrong Catch is a gripping, morally complex cozy mystery set on the Cornish coast — where the village is warm, the conspiracy was accidental, and the hardest question isn't who did it. It's what you do when nobody murdered him and everybody did.
Perfect for fans of Richard Osman, Ann Cleeves, and Janice Hallett.
✔️ Cornish & Coastal Setting
✔️ Cozy Mystery
✔️ Amateur Female Sleuth
✔️ No Single Villain — Everyone Did It
✔️ Morally Ambiguous Ending
✔️ Small Town & Village Secrets
✔️ Book Club Fiction
✔️ British Mystery
✔️ Slow Burn Investigation
✔️ Twenty-Year-Old Cold Case
309 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 5, 2026
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