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A Body in the Boathouse: A Merry Pengelly Mystery
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 28 2026
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.57 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A quiet Cornish harbour. A body in the boathouse. And a whole village grieving for the wrong woman.
After a decade chasing headlines in a Bristol newsroom, Merryn Merry Pengelly came home to bake bread - not to ask questions. These days it's saffron buns before dawn, gossip over the counter of The Gull & Gannet, and the gulls waking her before her alarm does. Trewellard-on-Sea may never stop calling her from away, but she's happy. Settled. Done with stories that end badly.
Then, on a warm June evening, she carries a flask of tea down to the old boathouse archive - and finds a woman slumped at the archivist's desk in a distinctive red coat.
In the failing light, it's Merry who names the victim. The police write it down exactly as she says it. And the village begins to mourn.
Three weeks later, the pieces still won't sit straight. A torn note nobody can explain. A break-in at the parish archive. A grief that doesn't quite match the person it's supposedly for. A quiet newcomer at the harbourside tea room who knows a little too much about the old harbour trust records - and a boat that went down in 1975 that the whole village would rather leave on the seabed.
DI Callum Rhys wants Merry back behind her counter. Her Aunt Demelza wants her to eat something. And half of Trewellard has already decided who's guilty.
Merry has been catastrophically wrong about a story once before. If she's wrong again, she'll ruin an innocent woman. If she's right, the killer is still walking into her bakery most mornings, smiling, buying a loaf.
Some secrets are kept for fifty years. Some are only kept until somebody starts looking.
A Body in the Boathouse is the first in the Merry Pengelly Mystery series: a traditional British whodunnit set in a small seaside village, with a full set of fair-play clues, an amateur sleuth you'll want to have tea with, and a mid-book twist most readers won't see coming.
No gore, no graphic violence, no explicit content - just a proper puzzle, a warm Cornish community, and a great deal of very good baking.
Perfect for fans of British cozy mysteries and small-town murder mystery series - readers who love Agatha Christie, M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin, Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club, Faith Martin, Joy Ellis, and Betty Rowlands, or anyone who's ever wished Midsomer Murders and Doc Martin had a bakery in it.
Scroll up and click Buy Now to visit Trewellard-on-Sea - where everyone knows everyone, and one of them is lying.
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