The Deer Park Mysteries · Book 1
The Larder at Dawn
Out now
Life at the Keeper’s Cottage starts early, and loudly.
Roy is twelve, and he has just been allowed out of the garden with his air rifle. Life at the Keeper’s Cottage, deep in Knole Park, starts before five every morning: fires to light, dogs to feed, and the deer park waiting in the mist.
But one dawn in half-term, Roy and his sister Jackie find the padlock on the old game larder hanging broken. Inside, something has been hidden that has no business in a deer park.
Church silver has been vanishing from villages across Kent. A stranger with very good binoculars keeps turning up at odd hours. A young man at the golf club is suddenly flashing money about. And at night, somebody keeps walking the landing of the ancient cottage.
With their sharp-eyed older sister Jane, Roy’s best mate Mick and Penny the terrier, Roy and Jackie set out to find who is using Knole’s quiet corners to hide stolen treasure, before the trail goes cold.
Book One of The Deer Park Mysteries: a fair-play mystery set in 1969, for readers aged 12 to 17.
Opening extract
The guinea fowl started at ten to five.
They always started at ten to five. Dad had bought them in the spring, on the grounds that guinea fowl were better than any watchdog and would shout the place down if a fox or a stranger came within a hundred yards of the cottage. This turned out to be perfectly true. What nobody had mentioned was that they would also shout the place down at the moon, at the wind, at a leaf, at each other, and at nothing whatsoever, in a voice like a rusty gate being dragged across a tin roof.
Go-back, go-back, go-back, said the guinea fowl, under Jackie's window. Go-back, go-back, go-BACK.