Whorl: A Cotswolds Crime Novel

A man is found dead in a stable above Cheltenham. Everyone says a horse did it. Everyone is wrong.On a wet October night, Adam Pyke is scanning fifty-year-old horse passports in a barn on the escarpment when somebody walks in behind him. By morning he is lying in a loose box with a wound the whole county is happy to call an accident.Detective Inspector Rhian Vaisey is not happy to call it anything. The mare in the box has no shoes on her hind feet. The bed has not been disturbed. And the last thing Adam ever scanned was a small inked spiral above a horse's eyes - a whorl, drawn on the wrong side of the wrong animal, in the spring of 2001.That was the spring the pyres burned on Cleeve Hill, the spring the Cheltenham Festival was cancelled, the spring a twenty-two-year-old work rider called Rosie Tapp went up Leckhampton Hill on foot and came down at the bottom of a quarry. Eleven minutes of inquest. Accidental death. A riding hat that came home without a mark on it.Twenty-five years later, the only honest witnesses left are on paper: a farrier's day book, a movement licence, a slaughter return, one photograph in an envelope of one hundred and sixty-two. And Sam Loveridge, the farrier who keeps them, is the last man Rhian can afford to fall for.As she pulls one thread out of a county that has spent a quarter of a century agreeing not to look, Rhian finds that the crime everybody assumed was about money was never about money at all - and that the woman who lied about it has built an entire life on top of the lie.A Cotswolds crime novel about paperwork, horses, and the terrible patience of the truth. Perfect for readers of Elly Griffiths, Ann Cleeves and Peter May.