In the Abbeys Shadow

In the steaming waters of the Roman Baths, a historian's death unearths a conspiracy that some will kill to keep buried.

When Dr Giles Barrington, the meticulous historian of Bath Abbey, is found floating face down in the Great Bath at dawn, the city is eager to call it a tragic misstep. But the agricultural mud on his shoes traces his last hours not to the ancient stones but to a contested parcel of Abbey land marked for a multi-million-pound development.

Seconded from Wells, DI Eleanor Brand knows how church hierarchies close ranks when money is at stake. Barrington had refused to soften his research into historic charitable covenants that threatened the sale. When an archive clerk suffers a fatal fall from a ladder and historic deeds begin to vanish from the vaults, Brand realizes she is hunting a killer who uses convenient accidents as a weapon.

To stop them she has to cut through the polite, defensive manoeuvres of Bath's elite before another inconvenient truth is silenced for good.