This is the second case for Kate Marshall, a former police detective with a terrible, tragic and troubled past who now works as a lecturer in crime on the south-west coast, and takes up private investigation work in her spare time.

We meet Kate again enjoying time off with her 16-year-old son Jake. They are diving together in a reservoir, searching for a lost town. Instead they discover the body of a young man, who had died, or had he been killed, in the days before.

The boy's mother entreats Kate to find out what had happened to her son as the police dismiss the case as an accident.

Kate, with her university assistant, Tristan, looks into the events and discovers much more than one teenager's tragic death. A missing person case highlights how people have been disappearing for years, there's possible police corruption, and a local landowning family has a stranglehold on the community.

Following on from meeting Kate first in 'Nine Elms', this is once again a gripping thriller. The characters of Kate and Tristan, their friendship, and their family situations are all brilliantly drawn, and the pace of the book is perfectly pitched. But once again the author has delved into a very dark world that I don't enjoy reading for entertainment - torture, imprisonment, violence against women, described in graphic detail. I skimmed these pages. I hope that for future novels in this series, Kate and Tristan will have less sick and sinister crimes to investigate!