The atmospheric and terrfiying new thriller, featuring Detectives Fry and Cooper from the award-winning Stephen Booth. For decades, Pity Wood Farm has been a source of employment for poor workers passing through Rakedale, migrants with lives as abject as the labour they sought. But now it seems a far worse fate may have befallen some of those who came upon this isolated community. Routine building work at the farm has unearthed a grisly discovery: a human hand preserved in clay. When police dig up the farmyard, they find not one, but two bodies -- and several years between their burials. With pressure from a new Superintendent and scant forensic evidence to aid them, DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper have only the memories of local people to piece together the history of the farm. In a case as cold as the ground, Cooper finds himself drawn to a desperate theory: that somewhere, there lies a third body which holds the key to these dreadful crimes.

Author Biography

Stephen Booth was born in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley and has remained rooted to the Pennines during his career as a newspaper journalist. He lives with his wife Lesley in a former Georgian dower house in Nottinghamshire and his interests include folklore, the Internet and walking in the hills of the Peak District. This is the eighth in the series featuring Derbyshire detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry.