the Girnal: A Novel of Howe o Turra

Turriff, 2004. Cormac Buchan has been a detective sergeant for ten weeks, posted to a country office where, everyone assures him, nothing ever happens. Then a retired seed inspector is found smothered under a foot and a half of barley in the intake pit at the merchant firm that has weighed the Howe's harvest for ninety years. The town agrees on the shape of it at once: an old man, a dark night, an unlucky step. Everyone except Detective Inspector Jean Sangster, who has policed this ground for thirty years and knows fine that careful men do not die careless deaths. And everyone except her big, quiet new sergeant, who cannot stop looking at the dead man's bunnet. Over one hairst, one pot of tea at a time, Buchan learns the trade he was born for: that the world keeps books, that a town knows more than it will ever say, and that the kindest man in the county may be the one entry that does not balance. The first of the Early Years mysteries: how the north-east's most patient detective was made, and the woman who made him.