Joanna Scanlan

Dot Watson has lost her way. Wracked with guilt and struggling with grief, she has tucked herself away in the London Transport Lost Property office, finding solace in the process of cataloguing misplaced things. It's not glamorous or exciting, but it's solitary - just the way Dot likes it.

That is, until elderly Mr Appleby walks through the door in search of his late wife's purse and Dot immediately feels a connection to him. Determined to help, she sets off on an extraordinary journey, one that could lead Dot to reclaim her life and find where she truly belongs...

Susan and Norma have been best friends for years, at first thrust together by force of circumstance (a job at The Pin Cushion, a haberdashery shop in 1990s Leicestershire) and then by force of character (neither being particularly inclined to make friends with anyone else). But now, thirty years later, faced with a husband seeking immortality and Norma out of reach on a wave of professional glory, Susan begins to wonder whether she has made the right choices about life, love, work, and, most importantly, friendship.

Nina Stibbe's new novel is the story of the wonderful and sometimes surprising path of friendship: from its conspiratorial beginnings, along its irritating wrong turns, to its final gratifying destination.

When a body is found near Beachy Head, the police chalk it up to suicide - a tragic but not uncommon end in these parts.

But local psychotherapist Patricia Philipps isn't convinced.

The victim? Her three o'clock patient, Henry Clayton.

The cause of death is supposedly self-inflicted. Yet Pat can't shake the belief that someone wanted Henry Clayton dead. She spends her working life listening to histories and secrets, and she has a nose for when a story doesn't quite ring true.

Drawn from the therapy room to the crime scene, Pat begins to notice what others appear to overlook.

At her side is her best friend Prichard - a home-brewer of fearsome, stomach-turning concoctions, an excellent cook, and a man who seems to get along with everyone. Which makes him useful for infiltrating village life.

As Pat and Prichard look beneath the village's thin veneer of normality - one that barely conceals its appetites - they discover a killer hiding in plain sight.