Robot Wrangler Roy and The Wedding at Dust Creek

The barge The Marigold puts down at Dust Creek for a quiet supper and finds a whole town gone mad with bunting. The frontier's biggest wedding in a generation is tomorrow, and the hired ceremonial crew, a brace of servers, two ushers, and one stately, soft-spoken butler called Pendrick, are behaving very strangely indeed.

They were flawless for two days. Now they keep drifting off their stations, gently, all the same way, toward the warm end of the party. The hire-company has a slim grey case and a kind voice: reset the lot, or send them back, before the clock runs out.

But Roy will not call a machine broken before anyone has gone and asked it what it thinks it is doing.

Warm, gently funny, full of heart. A standalone adventure; read in any order.