Death on Scolt Head Island (DI Peter Shaw & DS George Valentine #5)

Previously published as At Death's Window

It’s Detective Peter Shaw’s day off. He’s enjoying a leisurely lunch at the Old Ship Inn when a storm rolls in over Brancaster Marsh.

Then his RNLI pager goes off.

Minutes later, he’s racing across the water toward a stranded family cut off by the tide. He gets them out alive . . . but what they saw will haunt them forever.

Out on a shifting sandbank beneath Scolt Head Island, a body is surfacing with the flood.

The man is anchored to the mud, feet weighted, arms lifted by the tide as if reaching for help. His throat has been cut.

On the island, Detectives Shaw and Valentine find the signs of a calculated kill: two sets of footprints, one heavy, one light. Drag marks across the sand. A fire still warm at the top of the dunes.

But the crime scene won’t hold. With every hour, the tide erases the truth.

This was no impulsive killing. It was planned to the minute.

And the body wasn’t meant to vanish.

It was meant to be found.