Warden

She runs four hundred acres, a car park, a tea room she despises, and a barn that's been condemned for four years. She is the most overlooked woman on the Devon coast. Which is why she notices everything.Ruth Kerslake has been the National Trust warden at Stonecombe for twelve years. She knows the wording of all thirteen interpretation boards. She knows which step on the cliff path is loose, which gull is which, and exactly how the car-park machine likes to jam.So when a man takes shelter in her condemned barn through six weeks of the worst weather in years, gives a name she doesn't believe, fixes a fence he was never asked to fix, and asks her nothing, Ruth notices that too. She also notices the fishing boat reported lost up the coast, the drowned man the sea leaves in her cove, and the detective who keeps mistaking her for someone with nothing to say.Ruth has spent a lifetime not being seen. Now she has to decide what to do with the one thing she has seen more clearly than anyone, and whether some things are better left to the weather, and the barn, and the tide.Slow, dry, and tender: a coastal mystery told by the watcher at the edge of the frame.