Field of Stones (Hunter & Chase #2)

After seven hundred years of silence, a plague village claims one more death...

They called Ashenby cursed ground — a medieval village wiped out by plague and left to rot on the Suffolk heath, its ruined stones untouched by generations who knew better than to dig there.

But now a university archaeological team has broken through the ruins and found something that isn't centuries old — a body, sealed inside a hidden wartime foxhole, dead barely a week. Russell Fairbanks was a local soldier gone AWOL who came home to bury his mother. Nobody reported him missing, nobody went looking, and now nobody can explain how he ended up dead beneath the bare ruins of a village that's been empty since the Black Death.

DCI Chloe Hunter is still settling into the town she grew up in and the job she fought to earn — and still working alongside the father who walked out on her fifteen years ago. DI Donovan Chase claims he knows nothing about the Fairbanks family, but in Halewick, everyone knows everyone, and Donnie Chase knows more than most.

But as Chloe peels back the layers of Fairbanks' life, she finds a town full of people with reasons to want him forgotten, an archaeological discovery that has turned the team against each other, old debts that don't add up, and a death that looks less accidental with every question she asks.

Can Chloe and her team uncover what really happened to Russell Fairbanks — before the secrets buried at Ashenby stay buried for good?

The second book in the series of procedural crime thrillers featuring DCI Chloe Hunter and DI Donovan Chase spins out of the critically acclaimed Declan Walsh series of books.