MITTENS: The Hailsham Investigation

A missing cat. A dead man. And a town that notices everything.

At 7:14 a.m. on a quiet October morning in Hailsham, retired archivist Dorothy Fenn discovers a body in her garden.

The man is a stranger.
The details are not.

Dorothy has spent years recording the rhythms of her small East Sussex town — who comes and goes, who parks where, what sounds belong and which do not. Her notebooks are meticulous. Her memory, exact.

And on this morning, something doesn’t add up.

The gate was opened.
The timing is wrong.
And her cat, Mittens, has vanished.

Detective Sergeant Callum Webb is used to unreliable witnesses, half-truths, and guesswork. Dorothy Fenn offers none of those. Instead, she gives him something far more unsettling:

perfect information.

As the investigation deepens, a pattern begins to emerge — one that connects quiet streets, buried disputes, and a man who was careful enough to go unnoticed… until he wasn’t.

But in a town like Hailsham, nothing stays hidden forever.

Because someone is always watching.
And Dorothy Fenn has been watching for years.

A slow-burn British psychological mystery for readers of The Thursday Murder Club, The Appeal, and Patricia Highsmith.