Ladybird Ladybird

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are gone...

When a young widow is found dead in a burned-out glove workshop on the outskirts of Woodstock, everyone assumes arson gone wrong. But Nora Kinlan's death doesn't add up, and a two-year-old girl found alive in the rubble keeps repeating a single word nobody can explain.

As autumn closes in and the town prepares for the Michaelmas show, Hester Croft and Gertie Bundle unpick a web of secrets that reaches far beyond a failed gloving business, from poached hides and forged game books to a soldier who was supposed to be dead. Six people knew Nora was planning to talk. All six were out that night. And every one of them is lying about why.

The third book in the Woodstock Mysteries — a 1950s cosy crime series with sharp minds, sharper tongues, and murders that cut close to the bone.