Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his squad return in this psychological adventure and police procedural. He has featured in fifteeen previous adventures so a reader can be well acquainted with the vicissitudes of the lives of his police team. This tale begins with a banging barn door in the middle of a stormy night which leads farm manager, Ned Barton, to investigate. He finds a shocking scene in the stable - a mutilated woman’s body laid out across bales of straw. Discoveries of more bodies follow and Mike finds himself under pressure to find the perpetrator of this horrific crime.
The search for a missing person is followed by the attempt to understand the people who live on this estate and to understand any clues found in the countryside. Plenty of red herrings distract from the
intricate series of events that must be carefully linked in a chain to enable final elucidation by the police squad. Clare Curzon always uses psychology well, particularly in close-knit communities and this
story is no exception.
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Jennifer S. Palmer
As stated above there are 15 previous Mike Yeadings books, a series of 3 books about Lucy Sedgewick set in the Edwardian period and a number of stand alone titles by Clare Curzon who has been writing since the 1960s.