Four Miles An Hour

A drowned sister. A knot only she could tie. And a pursuit that never moves faster than walking pace.

For ten years, Mags Tolliver has enforced the fourteen-day mooring rule on two hundred and twelve miles of English canal. She counts everything: boats, days, footsteps, the turns of a windlass. Counting is how she survived the night her sister Cass vanished from a lock in the fog, leaving nothing behind but an unfinished knot tied around Mags's wrist.

Then, on a routine inspection of an overstaying narrowboat, a nine-year-old girl opens the door. She is polite, exact and alone. And she is holding the same knot.

The girl leads Mags into the Relay, a hidden network of boats that carries people who have reasons not to be found. Its members write nothing down, never ask a name, and never stay a fifteenth day. But someone has been selling their locations, and the trail runs uncomfortably close to Mags's own meticulous notebooks.

With her father, whose hands remember what his mind no longer can, a child who will not give her name, and a soft-spoken stranger walking the towpath behind them, Mags must take to the water. Locks take twelve minutes to fill. Tunnels are too narrow to pass. And on a winter dawn, the canal itself is due to be drained.

On the canal, you cannot outrun anyone. You can only keep moving.

Four Miles an Hour is a slow-burn novel of literary suspense, steeped in fog, cold water and strong tea: a story about family, secrets, and the people we choose not to ask.