When the luxury yacht Helen Brooks was last seen on is found abandoned amid the treacherous marshlands of the Humber Estuary, foul play is suspected. However, in the absence of a body, nothing can be proven. The owner of the yacht, ambitious businessman Simon Fowler, seems unprepared even to offer any sort of explanation as to what Helen was doing on board.A year later, Hull private investigator Leo Rivers is approached by Alison Brooks, Helen's mother, to investigate both the background to this disappearance and Fowler. Rivers is drawn through a long, hot summer into a world of human trafficking and governmental corruption at every turn. In the stifling heat there are many questions and few people prepared to offer adequate answers. Each unravelled piece of the mystery moves Rivers further from the vanished girl and deeper into a web of exploitation, greed, temptation, revenge and violence, from which even he is unable to extricate himself without unforeseen and tragic...

It is December 1922 and the aftershocks of the First World War continue to make themselves felt. Ex-soldier, poet and composer Ivor Gurney, suffering from increasingly frequent and deepening bouts of paranoid schizophrenia, is transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford.Neglected by the military and by his own family, and abandoned by all but a notable handful of his friends, Gurney begins a descent into the madness and oblivion which he believes has long been waiting to claim him.Yet following his arrival at Dartford, there are still those who continue to believe in Gurney's capabilities - in his 'wayward genius'. For a brief period, it seems that he might find some calm and ease in his life, and thus achieve the status so many consider him capable of.

It is the not too distant future. The Gulf Stream has ceased and the climate is plunged into turmoil. England has changed.Civil Servant Quinn is dispatched to conduct an audit on a remote plot of land up North, designated for a brand new model town. But he swiftly realises how inflammatory his presence is when confronted by those on the sharp end of the new reality: Owen, a suicidal farmer whose livestock has been destroyed after a slew of viruses; Winston, a disillusioned journalist with a gallery of photos that show the truth about the site; and Pollard, the local man of God whose faith is up for sale.But it is Anna, Quinn's sometime girlfriend, in charge of filling the dead cattle pits, who faces the deepest abyss of all. As the heavens open once again, the mountains of toxic soil that surround the site slowly begin to shift, and Quinn will face the ultimate test of his integrity.

An imprisoned paedophile and child murderer unexpectedly appeals his conviction. In return for a reduced sentence, he offers to implicate those involved in the crimes who were never caught; to provide evidence of Police corruption at the time of the original investigation; and, most importantly, to reveal where the corpses of several long-sought, but never found teenage girls are buried.Unhappy at what may be about to happen, but at the same time desperate to locate the body of his own missing daughter, the father of one of these girls approaches Private Investigator Leo Rivers with a plea for help.Rivers' enquiries stir cold and bitter memories. Long-dead enmities flare suddenly into violence and a succession of new killings. Everyone involved, then and now, and on both sides of the law, is unprepared for the suddenness and ferocity with which these old embers are fanned back into life. As the investigation progresses, it gathers momentum, and now must speed inexorably...

Germany, spring 1946. The Nuremberg Trials are underway. Three hundred miles north, in the Rehstadt Institute, a British "Assessment and Evaluation" centre, Alex Foster interrogates a succession of lesser war criminals, exploring their pasts and their crimes, and deciding their futures in the soon-to-be-reborn Germany.But Rehstadt, a town largely untouched by the war, is a place of old hostilities and burnished hatreds; a place still not entirely at peace; a place where the certainties of the past are still weighed favourably against the deprivations of the present and the vague, uncertain promises of the future.As spring progresses, and as events in the wider world quicken to their own closely observed conclusion, Alex Foster finds himself at the centre of a conflict involving British, American and German interests; and for the first time in his career he also finds himself compromised - forced into subterfuge and deceit as he struggles to weigh personal convictions...

Hull, autumn 2005 and private investigator Leo Rivers finds himself at the overheated heart of an inquiry into the savage killing of several young women. Approached by the mother of the chief suspect, he soon discovers not only that this suspect is not involved in the killings, but that several hitherto unconsidered and scarcely credible connections link the murders to a single perpetrator. In pursuing his case, Rivers has to contend with an ambitious, career-minded Chief of Police, who will stop at nothing to make a name for himself, sacrificing not only Rivers but also his own colleagues along the way. Set against a backdrop of the Humber and the long and violent destruction of Hull's once-cherished fishing industry, Robert Edric reveals a world of exploitation and ambition; a world of old men who burnish their festering grievances and vanities; and a world of long-suppressed but finally uncontainable brutality, in this final volume of a trilogy of outstanding and...

The stunning novel by the Booker longlisted author of PeacetimeIt is 1847, northern England, and Charles Weightman has been given the unenviable task of overseeing the flooding of the Forge Valley and evicting its lingering inhabitants. Weightman is heartily resented by these locals, and he himself is increasingly unconvinced both of the wisdom of his appointment and of the integrity and motives of the company men who posted him there. He finds some solace, however, in his enigmatic neighbour, Mary Latimer. Caring for her mad sister, Mary is also an outsider, and a companionship develops between the two of them which offers them both some comfort and support in their mutual isolation. As winter closes steadily in and as the waters begin to rise in the Forge Valley, it becomes increasingly evident that the man-made deluge cannot be avoided; not by the locals desperate to save their homes, nor by the reluctant agent of their destruction, Weightman himself. In a...

'Shows once more Edric's unassuming yet remarkable talent for conjuring up the lives of his characters' The Sunday TimesThe Fenlands, 1954It is a tough winter; the temperatures have fallen too low too quickly and the floods are the worst anyone can remember. Most people have lost everything but there are some who have found themselves eager for the chance at a new start. For Jimmy Devlin, it's a little of both. Forced from his home by an uncompromising bailiff, Jimmy has nothing to his name and the prospect of work digging urgently needed drains could be the opportunity he's been waiting for. But Jimmy, it seems, has a knack for finding trouble. Before long, he's caught up in the wrong business with the people from the fairground passing through town. But, on the run from the law, he has nowhere else to turn. With his keen eye and trademark candour, Robert Edric takes his readers to the most desolate of places, to...

The Broken Lands-a treacherous labyrinth of ice through which the fabled Northwest Passage was sought for centuries. Cabot, Frobisher, Hudson, Parry and Ross were all defeated, and the names on the maps testify to their despair: Bay of God's Mercy, the Devil's Cape, Savage Isles, and Repulse Bay. Determined to succeed where the rest had failed, Sir John Franklin-"the Lion of the Arctic"-set sail from Greenland in 1845. His two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, were last sighted in August of that year, after which the entire expedition-all 135 men-disappeared.For three years, the two ships were trapped in the Arctic ice. Eventually the slow vise of the ice pack and spoiling provisions proved to be too much. Nothing was heard of Franklin's expedition for over a decade, and only many years later did the world begin to learn of their terrible, agonizing fate. In this enthralling, richly inventive novel, Robert Edric recreates what possibly...

Morlancourt, Northern France, 1920 In the aftermath of the bloodiest conflict the world has ever seen, a small contingent of battle-worn soldiers remains in Northern France. Captain James Reid and his compatriots are tasked with the identification and burial of innumerable corpses as they assimilate the events of the past four years. The stark contrast between the realities of burying men in France and the reports of honouring the dead back in Britain is all too clear. But it is only when the daily routine is interrupted by a visit from two women, both seeking solace from their grief, that the men are forced to acknowledge the part they too have played. With his trademark unerring precision and lacerating honesty, Robert Edric explores the emotional hinterland which lies behind the work done by the War Graves Commission in the wake of...

Late summer 1946: the Wash on the Fenland coast. Into a suspicious and isolated community comes James Mercer, until recently a serving captain in the Engineers, who is now employed in the demolition of redundant gun platforms. A relationship grows between Mercer and the wife and daughter of a soldier who is soon expected home - though he is returning not from active service but from a sentence in military gaol, and his arrival is awaited with anxiety.Mercer also befriends Mathias, a German prisoner of war engaged in similar work who has no wish to be repatriated; and Jacob, a Jew, former glassmaker and camp survivor, of whose devastated journey to this isolated place Mercer gradually learns. He learns, too, of the bond between the German and the Jew and is drawn further into their history as the ex-soldier finally returns and begins to re-establish his overbearing authority.In a place where nothing has changed for decades, the agents of destruction and renewal are at work...