Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. for the first time, offers abundant evidence why the police-detective heroine, physically unattractive but extremely clever, and her meticulously plotted adventures (The Moth Catcher, 2016, etc.) have made such a splash in bookstores and in the TV series Vera.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. This first installment in Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series, now published in the U.S. As Vera seeks answers, she finds so many threads that link Bella’s suicide and Grace’s murder that it becomes hard to tell whether the murder is rooted in the quarry project or past secrets.

Assigned to the case is Inspector Vera Stanhope, who often visited the cottage years ago with her father, a friend of the rather famous lady who owned it. The owners of nearby Slateburn Quarries, Godfrey and Barbara Waugh, are less enthusiastic, but the survey continues until Grace is found strangled near Baikie’s. The owners of the land the quarry is on, Robert and Livvy Fulwell, are eager to see the project approved. Despite this gruesome discovery, the survey mostly goes as planned, although Grace, an uncommunicative young woman, observes an amazing number of otters in the stream running through the area. Arriving at Baikie’s Cottage, which is to be the group’s home base, Rachael finds her friend Bella, who lives nearby, hanged in the shed along with a suicide note. Three very different women-team leader Rachael Lambert, botanist Anne Preece, and zoologist Grace Fulwell-are hired to check the area of a planned quarry for environmental problems.

A British environmental survey suddenly turns dangerous when several deaths occur.

The crow trap book