Crumbs of Evidence

Millbrook has acquired a reputation it would rather not have. A handful of deaths in not very many seasons, and a baker who keeps turning out to have been standing somewhere nearby, are exactly the sort of thing that travels, and one cold morning it arrives in the person of Danny Wolfe: a true-crime podcaster with a microphone, a hired cottage, and a theory that a village this pretty has no business burying so many people. Eliza Hartwell, who has spent four cases learning to keep her head down, would dearly love to ignore him.

She does not get the chance. Within the week Danny Wolfe is dead, and the recordings and research files he leaves behind are not the breathless nonsense she expected. He had been pulling threads, patiently, the way she pulls them herself, and the threads run backwards: past the cold case that closed in the autumn, past the secrets still being read in a Cheltenham evidence room, and on into a village history far older than any death Millbrook will admit to. Somebody killed him to stop him reaching the end of them.

And in Gran's journal, read by a colder light now, Eliza finds the thing that unsettles her more than the body. The Hartwells have been noticing things, quietly, for generations, and the noticing has never once been safe. James Ashworth is back in the county, reassigned, nearer than he has been in a year, which ought to be the simplest comfort she has and somehow is not, because a year is a long time, and they are neither of them quite who they were when he got on that bus, and his old desk is no longer empty.

The fifth book in the Death & Sourdough series. Best served late at night, with strong coffee and the growing certainty that someone has been listening all along.