The Wintering Ground

A fairground always comes back to the same ground, season after season. This one didn't — not for twenty-five years.

When Gaskin's Fair pitches on the top field above Bellhaven-on-Sea for the first time in a generation, nobody in town can say why it ever stopped coming — and nobody thinks to ask. Then, on the second night, knife-thrower Levi Kimber is found dead beside the board he's thrown at for forty years, and the whole town agrees within the hour: an accident, with a blade he'd handled his whole life.

Rare-book dealer Cecily Mallory isn't so sure. But when she reaches for the one thing the ground has left behind — a handbill four hundred people handled in a single night — her gift gives her nothing she can use. Not a face. Not a voice. Just noise. For the first time in seven years, the thing she does best is no use to her at all.

What isn't useless is a question nobody in Bellhaven has thought to ask in twenty-five years: why did this fair really stay away so long? The answer is tangled up with a barmaid the town still swears "ran off with the fair" in 2002 — and DS Imogen Hale, the one detective who has learned to trust what Cecily can't explain, is starting to wonder whether anyone ever checked.

Some secrets aren't hidden at all. They're just never asked about.

The Wintering Ground is the seventh Margin Note Mystery: a cozy, atmospheric whodunit with a paranormal twist — old books, buried history, a clever amateur sleuth, and a cat with secrets of his own.