Dead on the Hour

The clocks went back an hour. Someone needed it to be two.

Ottilie "Otty" Tolhurst spent twelve years mending the clocks of a great London museum. Now her grandfather is gone, and she has come home to Stellbridge, under the South Downs, to keep open Tolhurst & Granddaughter, the last clock repairer in the county, with forty clocks on the walls and a one-legged jackdaw called Pinion who steals the small brass parts.

Every Saturday night that the clocks go back, Old Wilfred climbs the town hall tower to wind the turret clock and put it to bed, as he has for forty years. The whole town hears his ratchet at half past ten. This year, the town finds him in the morning, at the foot of the ladder.

An old man, a dark tower, an hour that happens twice: everyone agrees it was the hour that muddled him.

But the clock was wound, and wound by somebody who did not know which handle was which. And the hands were turned back, which Wilfred never did in his life.

With a stationmaster who lives by the timetable, a councillor who thinks she is a hobbyist, a detective sergeant who is secretly delighted by clocks, and a jackdaw who will not go near anyone he distrusts, Otty has to find out who was in the tower, and who has lied about the hour.

Dead on the Hour is the first Stellbridge Clockmaker Mystery: a warm, witty, fairly clued British cosy with a clock-mending sleuth, a slow-burn romance, a steam railway, a very bad-tempered bird and absolutely no gore.

A traditional cosy mystery: no gore, no on-page violence, no explicit content.