Fifty-two illuminated boats. One fatal fall. And a timetable that gives everyone the wrong alibi.Sedgeworth's bank holiday festival should be a weekend of music, dancing and narrowboats glittering above the valley. Thurstan Pickersgill would happily settle for watching the procession and avoiding the ceilidh.But plans to replace the marina with luxury flats have divided the town-and the Monday Puzzle Club. Winnie is leading the protest. Ambrose has quietly signed the opposing petition.Then, at dawn, the marina's owner is found dead on the riverbank, fifty feet below the aqueduct.The police suspect drink and a low wall. The town remembers Winnie announcing, before a marquee full of witnesses, that the marina would be sold over her dead body.Or his.Thurstan remembers something rather less dramatic: the water was running short.The festival timetable allowed eleven minutes per lock. With too little water in the top pound, those timings cannot be trusted. Neither can the alibis built around them-including that of Sedgeworth's most respectable man.His wrist barely mended, his club split down the middle and a newspaper dismissing him as a crank, Thurstan must prove what really happened during the procession. Meanwhile, his oldest friend faces a visit to the neurologist that makes their usual puzzles seem suddenly small.To clear Winnie, he needs his friends working together again. But suspicion is spreading, loyalties are fraying, and someone is relying on the town believing the printed timetable over the old keeper.Lanterns at Lock Twenty-One is Book Five in the Monday Puzzle Club Mystery series-a warm, witty mystery of divided loyalties, village festivities and water that keeps its own time.A clean cozy mystery with a complete fair-play solution, no graphic content, no explicit scenes and no bad language.
