Cambridge, 1940. It is the first winter of the war and the snow is falling thick and fast. A college porter, crossing the ancient Mathematical Bridge on his nightly rounds, is startled to hear a child’s cries from help coming from the icy river below.
939, Cambridge: The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout - The Great Darkness - covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the cool waters of the Cam.
When an explosion rips across Hunstanton Beach on the north Norfolk coast, an abandoned Second World War bomb is assumed to be the cause . . . but is it? Could there be a connection with the new pier being built and the increasingly bitter campaign to halt its construction?
When the newspapers turn up to cover Ruby Bright's 100th birthday, they find her seaside care home is a murder scene. Someone spirited Ruby away by wheelchair down to the water's edge on the idyllic north Norfolk coast, and strangled her. But why kill a harmless centurion?
When a body is found beneath the waves off the north Norfolk coast the contents of the dead man's pockets set DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine on the trail of a most creative killer…