Kate Wolfe arrives in Cheshire with damage already stamped into her file. A disciplinary hearing in London preceded her, and Helen Taylor—the new boss, veteran detective who knows how to read trouble when she sees it—has been briefed. Kate’s trying to prove she’s not the problem everyone thinks she is. The problem is she probably is.
The case arrives: arson, a body in a burned building, an architect missing. It looks provincial on the surface—the kind of thing that gets solved in a few days in a town like this. Underneath it’s uglier. More complicated. A dumped vehicle at the bottom of a quarry lake that opens into something neither of them prepared for.
Helen and Kate work the case together. The attraction builds in the background—inconvenient and constant, the kind of thing you can’t quite ignore even when you’re trying to. It doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates. A look held a second too long. The way they disagree about the evidence. The understanding that forms between them about what the case actually is.
Mills treats the romance and the mystery with equal weight. Neither one gets sacrificed to the other. They’re both serious. They’re both driving the narrative forward in different ways.
The Cheshire setting isn’t just punishment posting. It has texture—the specific weight of a backwater, the way communities in small places operate, the ways gossip travels and alibis collapse under local knowledge. Helen knows this place. Kate is learning it. The landscape shapes what’s possible between them.
Details
| ISBN: 9783963241253 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Mystery |
| Subject(s): Fiction; Lesbian; Lgbtq+; Mystery & Detective; Women Sleuths |
| Publication Date: 2019-02-06 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Ylva Verlag e.Kfr. |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 238 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: |
| Book_ID: 106005 |