Detective Kate Hamblin

Detective Kate Hamblin is doing surveillance on the Somerset Levels, trying to catch a crazed arsonist. She leaves the van for a moment. Then it goes up in flames, killing her two colleagues. Kate is accused of abandoning them and is excluded from the murder hunt and effectively suspended from duty. She is desperate to nail the killer herself and clear her name. She risks all by entering into an unholy alliance with the murder team's chief suspect. Kate finds herself not only targeted in a personal vendetta by her own DCI, but stalked by the very killer she is pursuing.

Two years ago, psychotic undertaker Larry 'Twister' Wadman disappeared after blasting two police detectives to death with an incendiary device and embarking on a murderous rampage across the Somerset Levels. For most, memories have dulled, but the sole survivor of the carnage, Detective Kate Hamblin, cannot forget. Then a prostitute’s body is found dumped in a coffin in Twister’s now derelict funeral parlour, dressed in a police uniform. Kate realises that her old enemy is back and out to get her.

Kate returns from a disastrous honeymoon, only to be plunged into a macabre murder investigation. A teenage girl last seen leaving a party at the height of a local scarecrow festival is found strangled and partially stripped in her own barn. The gruesome crime is an exact copy of the 150-year-old murder of peasant girl, Martha Tinney, alleged by superstitious locals to have been committed by a spectral scarecrow, nicknamed Strawfoot. 

Missing journalist Ellie Landy is found in the River Parrett by a news crew covering the worst floods the Somerset Levels have suffered in living memory. A paperback is found by the woman’s bed with a mysterious inscription mentioning 'Sandman' and a time of day. Police assume it is an accidental drowning. Kate disobeys orders from the top and probes the death, as she suspects this was no accident. When another woman dies in suspicious circumstances, Kate finds herself drawn ever deeper into a nightmare of murder, treachery and perversion.

Detective Kate believes that her own number is up when she finds herself staring at the wrong end of a double-barrelled shotgun on a sodden stretch of Somerset marshland. She’s on the trail of villain Lenny Stallard, who has just broken out of prison. He was serving time for the murder of the elderly wife of a colonel during a robbery at their country residence near Bridgwater. Revenge appears to be the motive, and for DS Lewis’s superior, it is a cut-and-dried case as the bodies of trial witnesses begins to mount up. But it’s all a bit too convenient.

An eccentric letter arrives at the police station from a man threatening to kill his aunts. Detective Kate and her colleagues don’t take it seriously. But an elderly woman is found strangled in her home. 'RIP Auntie' is written on the floor in red lipstick. Then another older woman is murdered. With a major police manhunt underway, it becomes clear that they are up against a very dangerous serial killer, who is engaged in some kind of personal vendetta. An adversary who will not stop until he has achieved what he set out to do.