Murder in the Fens (Tara Thorpe 4) is out today! @Bookouture

I’m delighted to say the fourth book in the Tara Thorpe series is out today in Kindle and paperback formats!

Here’s the blurb:

When the body of twenty-year-old Julie Cooper is found – her pockets stuffed full of wilting flowers – in an iron-age hill fort on the edge of the fens, Detective Tara Thorpe and her team are called in to investigate. The evidence points to an illicit affair gone wrong… but is there more to the story?

As always at the Cambridge constabulary, the case turns personal. Detective Blake is exhausted after the arrival of a new baby with wayward wife Babette, and Tara is keen to put as much distance between herself and Blake as she can – both at the station and on the hunt for the killer. Charming rookie officer Jez is the perfect distraction… but is he a little too good to be true?

Then Tara makes a startling breakthrough when she finds an unsettling family heirloom hidden in the late victim’s bedroom – a golden statue of a sinister-looking cat with emerald eyes. As she traces its origins, Tara begins to realise that Julie’s murder is no one-off crime, but a sinister plot with its roots in a terrible secret that was covered up decades earlier.

The book is a standalone mystery, but also rounds off Tara’s story and those of the other series characters, if you’ve been following the books! This link should take you to the Amazon site for your territory if you’d like to buy a copy. I do hope you enjoy it!

As ever, as well as extending massive thanks to Bookouture for their wonderful input, I’d also like to thank all the readers who have put up advance reviews of Murder in the Fens on NetGalley, and to the wonderful book bloggers who have signed up to take part in the blog tour. Here are the details:

What’s next?

My next venture with Bookouture is a cosy mystery series set in coastal Suffolk, close to where my grandmother lived. I love the picturesque villages in the county, and the way they contrast with the wild North Sea, and Suffolk’s beautiful but eerie estuaries and marshes.

The new series will publish in early 2020 and will feature Eve Mallow, who’s an obituary writer. The idea for her profession came to me after listening to some fascinating interviews with Margalit Fox, who formerly fulfilled that role for the New York Times. (You can find the interviews on YouTube.)