Josie Halyard
Cover of Three Knots for a Gale

A Knot-Wife Mystery · Book One

Three Knots for a Gale

A tidal island. A dead man in a gale nobody forecast. And a knot-wife who swore she’d never tie another knot.

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Free to read with Kindle Unlimited. Also on Amazon UK · Canada · Australia · Germany

Read the blurb

Cozy mysteries with a touch of seaside magic

The Knot-Wife Mysteries

Stella Curnow comes home to the tidal island of Merrow Holm to bury her grandmother, the island’s last knot-wife, and stays to solve its murders with the craft she ran away from, while the knot that keeps the sea off the Holm slowly comes undone.

  1. Cover of Three Knots for a Gale

    Book One

    Three Knots for a Gale

  2. Cover of Slack Water

    Book Two

    Slack Water

    Out 24 November 2026

  3. Cover of The Wreckers’ Lantern

    Book Three

    The Wreckers’ Lantern

    Coming soon

  4. Cover of A True Lover’s Knot

    Book Four

    A True Lover’s Knot

    Coming soon

  5. Cover of Fog on the Causeway

    Book Five

    Fog on the Causeway

    Coming soon

  6. Cover of The Fourth Knot

    Book Six

    The Fourth Knot

    Coming soon

Where the books are set

The Saltwind Coast

A long coast of headlands, estuaries and tidal islands, in a country you won’t find on a map. There’s a telephone on the wall and a wireless in the kitchen, motor launches and a twice-weekly bus, but no mobile phones, so news still travels at the speed of gossip and the tide.

Magic here is quiet, local and half-believed. Fishermen buy wind-cords the way other people touch wood, and on Merrow Holm the knot-wife’s shop has sold them for three hundred years.

Letters from the coast

Hear when the next book is out

News of each new Knot-Wife Mystery on the day it comes out, and the occasional letter from the Saltwind Coast.