Writes fiction about what people know and decline to say — in a stranger’s house at night, on a canal that gives things back, and nine fathoms under a warm green sea.
Seven standalones, seven jobs that put a stranger inside a family. Each one withholds the truth by a different method, and no method is ever used twice.
Seven drafted · as Cate Harrow Cozy crimeOne failing Lancashire marina, four people who cannot leave it alone, and a canal that keeps handing back what was put into it — a body a year, none of them recent.
Six drafted · as Nora Fenwick RomantasyFive books, closed, no continuation. The ending was written before chapter one and the cost goes up in every volume — never down, not once.
Two drafted, all five designed · as Elowen MarshSeven separate novels about the jobs that put a stranger inside a house at the worst week of its life — night nurse, house sitter, trauma cleaner, locksmith, interpreter. Each is a first-person present-tense narrator who is telling you the truth and still not telling you the thing, and the series rule is that the method of withholding is never reused: one book flags it on the page, one buries it in a document you are handed, one states it outright as an accusation and lets you disbelieve it on the narrator’s behalf. Start anywhere.
Live-in palliative night nurse
Cara is paid to be in your house at night. Nine till seven, alone with the Aldertons while their adult son is dying upstairs. It is good work, and she is good at it. There is a bolt on the outside of Daniel’s door. It has been taken off once before, and put back. Nobody in the house mentions it, and Cara has sat in enough houses to know what not to ask.
House sitter
Forty-one houses in four years, because a county court judgment means no landlord in Britain will rent to Jo Merrick. Six weeks in an empty second home on the north Norfolk coast is the easiest booking she has had. The post that keeps arriving is for a woman called Elin Maddox, who is not the owner, has no forwarding address, and sat this house before her.
Trauma cleaner
Nine days after a tenant is found dead in a first-floor flat in Burslem, a trauma cleaner is let in and paid in cash to have it re-lettable by the first. She takes the job because she needs it and because she is good at it. Within two days she knows two things the coroner does not. The first is that somebody cleaned that room before she got to it.
Live-in infant sleep consultant
Four weeks, live-in, with a family in North Yorkshire whose two-year-old will not sleep. Seven at night till seven in the morning, with a monitor, a camera and a log. She is the third consultant they have paid and the fourth professional in that house in two years. By the end of the first week she has what none of them had — twenty-one consecutive nights of data, and a question none of them thought to ask.
Estate clearer
An eighty-one-year-old man, died at home, no next of kin traced. Four weeks, twelve rooms, and a schedule of contents at the end of it. On the first floor there is a door with a mortice lock and no key anywhere in the house. When she gets it open in the second week it is a young woman’s bedroom, kept exactly as it was, and everything in it is dated 2009.
Locksmith
Eleven locks, two safes, a garage and a stable block: five days’ work re-keying an occupied house after a break-in, with the annexe thrown in because the client offers and she cannot afford to refuse. She knows by eleven o’clock on the first morning that there was no break-in. She says nothing, and she stays — because in eleven weeks there is a family court hearing about her daughter, and her solicitor has told her what she needs: six months of unbroken employment and a fixed address.
Public-service interpreter
Ten past one on a Tuesday morning, a terraced house in Walker, a seven-year-old in the RVI with a spiral fracture and an explanation that does not fit it. Two police officers, a social worker, a grandmother asleep upstairs, a seventeen-year-old who has been her family’s interpreter since she was seven, and a mother with about four hours to explain a broken arm. Marta’s job is to render everything anybody says, in the first person, without adding, omitting or explaining. She is the only person in that house who understands all of it.
Barrow Cut is a failing marina on the Lancaster Canal, left to four people who did not ask for it: Priya, Douglas, Estelle and Wes. Once a year the water gives something back — drawn down for repairs, drained for the first time since 1998, opened up for a winter sale — and what comes up is never recent, which is the whole point. The police close each of them fast and reasonably. The club is slower and is not reasonable. Best begun at book one, but each stands alone.
A body comes up in the Barrow lock when the water is drawn down for repairs. It has been there eleven years, and the police have it as misadventure inside a fortnight. Four residents of a failing Lancashire canal marina do not — and in working out who she was, they find that the man who left them all this was running something none of them knew about.
Six narrowboats from a collapsed hire firm are laid up at Barrow Cut for the winter, the first good money the marina has seen in years. In February, when the fleet is opened up for sale, there is a man dead under the deck boards of Fettle Six. He has been there since October, and that boat was padlocked at Garstang and brought down the Lancaster Canal by hand, at two miles an hour, with somebody stood on the back of it the whole way.
A weekender’s narrowboat goes down on her mooring in a February frost, and when Wes Adeyemi lifts her there is a man in the cabin who does not own her, has no papers and no telephone, and whom nobody claims for six weeks. Wes knows inside twenty minutes that she was sunk on purpose. He is the only person at Barrow Cut who could know it, and the one man in England whose word about a hull is worth nothing.
The silted arm below Barrow lock is drained in March for the first time since 1998, and eleven feet down, lying on its roof, is a Vauxhall Cavalier with nobody in it. The registration belonged to Alan Stopforth, who walked out of a house at Barrow on the eleventh of November 1998 and was never seen again — four hundred yards from where everybody had assumed he went into the water.
No licence since 2011. No insurance. No boat safety certificate. Twenty-eight days to take the boat out of the water, and then the Trust takes it and destroys it. There is a woman living on it who will not speak to anybody official, who has no GP, no bank account and no address, and who has moved that boat every fourteen days for sixteen years.
A woman is found dead in a locked cabin at Barrow Cut with no next of kin anyone can trace, and the coroner will not release the boat because the boat is the estate and the estate has no claimant. She had been on mooring 31 for four years. Nobody knows her surname, and three of them think they do. The case needs somebody who can get a door opened — and the person who could do that for twenty-nine years is the reason the marina is short a chair.
The sea rose and did not stop. What is left of the world lives on eleven drowned peaks around a ring of warm green water, and below the thermocline live the leviathans — vast, old, patterned, indifferent, and reachable only by voice, only at depth, in a song that cannot be made in air. Five books, designed end to end before the first was written, with the ending fixed in advance and a cost that rises in every volume and never comes down. Book one only.
The Conservatory of the Ninth Fathom takes sixty a year and graduates twenty, and one initiate in three does not surface from the first long line. Selene Var-Ashe arrives on false papers, sent by her mother to find out what is under the building’s lowest cistern.
Corien Halloway wrote the report that would finish her, and did not send it. Selene is still at the Conservatory on false papers, still descending, and Ferrow has begun answering her in a register she never taught him. The Quiet Accord that ended the war was never a peace between Houses. It was an agreement to stop listening — and four hundred years of descent logs are missing the same nine minutes each. Her cover holds for two hundred days.
War opens along the Ring, and the Quiet Accord cannot survive proof. Selene goes outward to the deep-houses that never signed, never bonded and never forgave, to ask the people her mother’s House ruined for help. Eleven weeks of open water, six refusals, and a fleet assembled in a drowned harbour — and the ally who came easiest was promised elsewhere.
Tamsin Oke has been held for eight months by a house that does not use the word prisoner, and she has learned what the leviathans keep in the deep: a record, older than the Ring, older than anything that has been alive on this world. Selene comes for her. Both of them find out what is in it, and what it costs to sever a bond and live.
Every House on the Ring can now sever a bond and expect the singer to live, so every House is building a fleet of singers it can spend. The Anchorites have been owed an answer for four hundred and six years. Selene Var-Ashe cannot hear the deep and will not hold a pen, and she is the only person alive who has been down, come back, and is not for sale.
A reader who follows a byline out of a psychological thriller and into a canal-marina cozy is a lost reader, and it works the same way in every direction. So these three series are sold under three names that have nothing to do with each other.
They are not disguises. They are shelf labels — a promise about what the next two hundred pages will feel like, which is the one promise a cover and a name are actually for. The Quiet Trades promises a narrator you cannot fully trust and a house you cannot leave. The Slack Water Club promises the opposite: a place you would like to live, four people worth the time, and a puzzle that plays fair. The Salt Choir promises a closed arc, a fixed ending, and a price that goes up.
What they have in common is method rather than mood. Each series was designed before it was written — a shape, a set of rules, and an ending agreed in advance — and then held to. Eighteen books, fifteen of them in full draft, and none of them yet on sale.