The island is beautiful. The storm is coming. And someone just turned a game into a crime scene.
Harriet Cole has spent her career writing cosy crime mystery books, she didn’t want to come to the lighthouse. Her literary agent called it research. Harri called it a weekend away from her half-finished manuscript and her elderly cat. She packed a bag, boarded the ferry, and told herself it would be fine.
The Lighthouse B&B is everything the brochure promised, a lovingly restored Victorian lighthouse perched on a remote island off the coast, all stone walls, spiral staircases, and dramatic sea views. The other guests seem perfectly pleasant, if a little guarded. The host, Ewan Rath, is charming and attentive. And the murder mystery weekend he has arranged is exactly the kind of theatrical whodunit Harri has spent her career writing: actors in costume, planted clues, a scripted drama to be solved over dinner and a glass of wine.
Then the lights go out.
When they flicker back on, one of the guests is dead. Everyone applauds. It’s all part of the game, surely. Except Harri notices something small, and wrong, and deeply unsettling, a detail that doesn’t fit the script. A reaction from the host that runs a beat too genuine.
By the time the storm rolls in and there’s no way off the island, Harri is the only one who suspects the game has turned real.
Stranded on an island with a handful of strangers, any one of whom could be a killer, Harri does what she has always done when a story stops making sense. She starts from the beginning and reads more carefully. But as she digs into the lives of her fellow guests, she discovers that this particular gathering was no accident. Someone didn’t just plan a murder mystery weekend.
Someone planned a murder.
A Murder at the Lighthouse is a deliciously clever debut cosy mystery that will delight fans of Richard Osman and the golden age of Agatha Christie. It has all the ingredients the genre demands, an irresistible setting, a tight ensemble of thoroughly suspicious characters, a puzzle that deepens with every revelation, and a twist that reframes everything you thought you understood, delivered with warmth, wit, and the kind of plotting that keeps you reading long past the point when sensible people have gone to bed.
At the centre of it all is Harriet Cole: mid-list crime novelist, reluctant detective, possessor of dry wit and a genuinely inconvenient tendency to notice things other people miss. Harri is the kind of protagonist you’ll want to follow across a dozen books, someone who thinks in plot structures and speaks in well-timed observations, and who is quietly, consistently, magnificently underestimated by everyone around her.
The real brilliance of this story, and the question that will keep you turning pages, is not simply who did it. It’s how many stories have been running simultaneously, and which one you’ve been reading.
The lighthouse is both beautiful and claustrophobic, a retreat that becomes a trap. The storm that pins the guests in place is as much a presence as any character. And the murder mystery within the murder mystery adds a layer of delicious complexity that rewards careful reading: the scripted clues and the real ones blur together, and the line between performance and truth grows harder to see with every blackout.
Cosy, clever, and compulsively readable, A Murder at the Lighthouse is the book to curl up with when you want a mystery that respects your intelligence, keeps its secrets well, and delivers a final act that earns every gasp.
