Cornish Castle Island (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798327973947)

The castle has been keeping its secret for five hundred years. It was waiting for the right person to come and ask.

When Emily Trevithick loses her job at a London museum, she does the only sensible thing: she takes a small heritage grant, packs her car to the roof with archive boxes, and drives to the very edge of England to save a half-ruined castle on a tidal island in Cornwall.

She doesn't expect it to be easy. She doesn't expect the village to trust her, the sea to cooperate, or the grant to stretch far enough. What she doesn't expect at all is the metre of nothing she finds in the lower vaults - a gap between the walls that shouldn't exist, that doesn't appear on any plan, and that someone, five hundred years ago, went to extraordinary lengths to hide.

Trevannick Castle Island has been falling into the sea for a generation, and everyone in Marazion has an opinion about what should be done with it. Smooth, silver-haired Councillor Trevean has been quietly steering it towards a private developer for years. The ferocious, white-haired Morvah Jago - last of four generations of castle caretakers - is running out of time to pass on her keys. And Thomas Penrose, the guarded, ink-stained local historian with an extraordinary private archive and a ten-year habit of hoping for nothing, is about to have his careful, solitary life entirely overturned by a woman who turns up with a laser measure and a flat refusal to be told the answer is no.

As Emily digs deeper - into the castle's structure, its records, and the doctored Tudor inventory that suggests somebody once falsified the King's own documents to hide a room - she finds herself in the middle of something far bigger than a feasibility study. A community that is beginning, cautiously, to believe. A man who has forgotten how to hope and is remembering, against his better judgement. And a five-hundred-year-old secret that has been waiting, in the dark, for exactly the right person to finally come looking.

But someone wants the castle sold, the grant derailed, and Emily gone - and they are very good at making things quietly, legally, impossible.

Cornish Castle Island is a warm, slow-burn romance wrapped around a heritage mystery, set in a Cornish village where the tide sets the schedule, the pub is always open, and the past is never quite finished with you. It is a story about what it means to belong somewhere at last, about the courage it takes to do the work when you can't see the end, and about keeping a light burning for whoever comes next.

Perfect for fans of Rosamunde Pilcher, Jenny Colgan, and Kate Mosse.

If you love cosy British romance with a sense of place, hidden history, slow-burn love stories, community spirit, and heroines who solve problems with spreadsheets and stubbornness - this is the book for you.

Cornish Castle Island is the first book in The Marazion Chronicles, a series set in the far west of Cornwall. Each book stands alone, but the village, the castle, and the people you'll fall in love with here carry through the whole series.