Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb digs holes on Exmoor, hoping to find a body. Every day after school, while his classmates swap football stickers, Steven goes digging to lay to rest the ghost of the uncle he never knew, who disappeared aged eleven and is assumed to have fallen victim to the notorious serial killer Arnold Avery. Only Steven’s Nan is not convinced her son is dead. She still waits for him to come home, standing bitter guard at the front window while her family fragments around her. Steven is determined to heal the widening cracks between them before it’s too late. And if that means presenting his grandmother with the bones of her murdered son, he’ll do it. So the boy takes the next logical step, carefully crafting a letter to Arnold Avery in prison. And there begins a dangerous cat-and-mouse game between a desperate child and a bored serial killer

In the closed Exmoor village of Shipcott, first encountered in Blacklands, the local bobby Jonas Holly is shocked by the death of Priddy. Knowing such a case is beyond his remit, Holly calls in the top guns and we observe the arrival of DCI Marvel from Taunton: a man who proves to be an extreme irritant to Holly’s well meaning efforts, rendering them hapless at every opportunity and sucking away at Holly’s self esteem. Soon, it becomes apparent that someone aims to remove from Shipcott all of its most vulnerable and dependent: the elderly and the ailing, or a combination of the both. Within this, Holly’s wife Lucy, a housebound sufferer of MS, seems a prime target

The eight-year-old boy had vanished from the car and - as if by slick, sick magic - had been replaced by a note on the steering wheel...'You don't love him'...At the height of summer a dark shadow falls across Exmoor. Children are being stolen from cars. Each disappearance is marked only by a terse note - a brutal accusation. There are no explanations, no ransom demands ...and no hope. Policeman Jonas Holly faces a precarious journey into the warped mind of the kidnapper if he's to stand any chance of catching him. But - still reeling from a personal tragedy - is Jonas really up to the task? Because there's at least one person on Exmoor who thinks that, when it comes to being the first line of defence, Jonas Holly may be the last man to trust

‘The dead can’t speak to us,’ Professor Madoc had said. That was a lie. Because the body Patrick Fort is examining in anatomy class is trying to tell him all kinds of things. Life is already strange enough for the obsessive Patrick without having to solve a possible murder. Especially when no one else believes that a crime has even taken place. Now he must stay out of danger long enough to unravel the mystery – while he dissects his own evidence. But as Patrick learns one truth from a dead man, he discovers there have been many other lies rather closer to home…

‘Call your mother.’ ‘What do I say?’ ‘Say goodbye.’ This is how it begins. Lone women terrorized and their helpless mothers forced to watch – in a sick game where only one player knows the rules. And when those rules change, the new game is Murder. Living with her parents in the dank beach community of Limeburn, ten-year-old Ruby Trick has her own fears. Bullies on the school bus, the forest crowding her house into the sea, and the threat of divorce. Helping her daddy to catch the killer might be the key to keeping him close. As long as the killer doesn’t catch her first…