Friday, 5 a.m.

Novels aren’t good for you, thinks Jane Hepburn as she stares down at the body of her literary agent.

The Victorians had it right. What good can filling your head with invented horrors do? People like to blame video games for inspiring violence, but Jane is standing in a tent surrounded by books crammed with the stuff. Serial killers, assassins, women who murder their husbands, and friends who knock each other off on holiday. Men who trick women with amnesia. Women who fake their own deaths for revenge. Clowns who emerge from sewers to torment children.

And now, there is a real-life corpse on the floor.

It is the second day of the Killer Lines Crime Fiction Festival in Hoslewit, a Cumbrian village on which the entire publishing industry descends once a year. Jane has crept into the bookselling tent at 5 a.m. while everyone else is still sleeping off the excesses of the night before. Her plan was to take this opportunity to . . . rearrange things. Just a little. After all, it’s not really fair that her books – all six of the excellent PI Sandra Baker series – are confined to the furthest corner of the highest shelf when they could be on the attractive table in the centre of the tent. People buy what they can see in front of them – and Jane was determined that someone would at least see her books.

True, she has been sneakily rearranging bookshop shelves for months now, and it hasn’t had any noticeable impact on sales. She isn’t one to give up easily though, and today might just have been the day that changed things.

But finding the bookselling tent . . . occupied has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works.

No, reading crime novels can’t be good for you at all. As she lies on her back, the milky whites of Carrie Marks’s eyes stare up at the canvas ceiling of the temporary bookshop, her skin damp with morning dew and smudged coral lips slightly parted, a smear of blood under her nose. Carrie Marks, a literary agent who was revered and feared in equal measure, is still wearing her trademark tailoring – an anomaly in an industry full of floral print maxi dresses – but the silk of her blouse is stained and her mud-spattered skirt has ridden up to show a knobbly knee. Despite this rare glimpse of vulnerability, even in death she looks as if she could eat you alive.

It doesn’t take an expert – and after writing six (admittedly poorly selling) novels on the subject of murder, Jane does consider herself one – to realise that Carrie Marks is dead. For the avoidance of any doubt, someone has stuck a large dagger through her heart, and she is covered in blood.

After boldly prodding Carrie’s leg with one toe, Jane confirms this isn’t some sort of feeble publicity stunt for a new novel. On the contrary, it looks as though this year’s Killer Lines Crime Fiction Festival is about to get a lot more interesting.