On the night Nettlebeck lights its bonfire, Nell Sowerby tells one small lie to keep her family whole — and by morning, a man is dead in the ashes.
Selwyn Fothergill, the bonfire committee's quiet solicitor-auditor, is found dead the morning after the village's biggest night of the year. Nell is certain her younger sister Fran was exactly where she said she'd be — certain enough to tell the police so herself.
But Detective Sergeant Adam Ridsdale — newly back in the village he once left, and still living down a case that went badly wrong in his last posting — starts pulling the investigation apart hour by hour, and Nell's story doesn't hold. Fran wasn't where Nell said. And she isn't the only person in Nettlebeck with something to protect.
As suspicion narrows onto a neighbor the village has never much liked, and the pressure to close the case collides with everything Nell has built her life around, she has to decide how far a family will go to keep its secrets — and what it costs the people standing closest to them when the truth finally catches up.
Warm, twisty, and quietly devastating, The Bonfire Night Alibi is a novel about the alibis we give the people we love, and the fire that eventually outs them all.