New Book: COLD IN THE EARTH

Today’s the day when my latest novel (psychological crime) is officially available from Amazon, as paperback and e-book. COLD IN THE EARTH. Yes I know the title’s been used before but then so have all my titles, and I really needed this one because of the way Emily Brontë’s poem continues, especially the third verse:

Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring:
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

For fifteen, in my book, read twenty-five. In the 1990s, a young man has been killing girls. It takes the police a while to join up the dots and recognise that there’s a serial killer at work, but when they do, he’s quickly caught. He’s locked up. Forget him. He doesn’t matter. What matters in the secret that’s been locked up with him. Where has he left the bodies of his victims – all his victims, including those that the law hasn’t seen fit to recognise? Twenty-five years on, they have still not been found, and neither has the murderer’s mother who may hold the key to the secret.

Enter Rosanna Quillan, who made her first appearance in BETHULIA. She’s no longer with the police, but willing to turn her hand to some detective work for a good cause. But she is going to have to work fast, because time is running out for one grieving parent.

Parents are an issue with Rosanna. Her father is a swine and her mother, broken and abused, committed suicide, a fact that continues to haunt the daughter. Nothing is black and white where mothers are concerned, so maybe Rosanna is more willing to sympathise, when others merely condemn.

COLD IN THE EARTH