A Vet in Hartcote: the Hearr of Country Vet: Book 1

Dr Rachel Webster came to Hartcote for six months. She intended to leave in August. She did not, however, intend to be out on a Cotswold hillside at midnight, guiding a difficult lambing by torchlight while a sceptical farmer watched in silence from the pen gate. She did not intend to find herself judging Victoria sponges at the WI spring show, fielding the market-day opinions of the entire town, or becoming unexpectedly invested in the fate of a stray border collie with one tan eyebrow and a look of permanent enquiry. Hartcote has a way of making itself necessary before you have quite noticed it happening. Somewhere between the honey-coloured stone of the high street and the muddy lanes of Elmshaw Farm, Rachel is building something she did not plan. The animals need her - that part she expected. Less expected is the town itself: its WI raffles and Thursday markets, its taciturn farmers and forthright receptionists, and one particular police sergeant whose path seems to cross hers with a frequency that can only be described as suspicious. Tom Fleming is courteous, unhurried, and quietly curious about her. Rachel is a practical woman and chooses not to examine this too closely. Warm, funny, and rooted in the particular pleasures of the English countryside, *A Vet in Hartcote* is a novel about competence, community, and the awkward discovery that a place you meant to leave has started, somehow, to feel like home.