Deadly Remains

Kate Ellis

THE amazing million-copy bestselling author Kate Ellis and her cerebral black detective Wesley Peterson are not just a ‘force’ to be reckoned with... they have rightly become something of a crime writing sensation.

Deadly Remains is the (staggering!) twenty-ninth novel in the Liverpool-born author’s cleverly constructed, classic crime series which is set amidst the rural charms of Devon and weaves the past and present into complex, thrilling mysteries, attracting yet more adoring fans with each much-anticipated outing.

A perfectly matched pair of chalk-and-cheese detectives, excellent police procedural, compelling, immaculately researched plots, stand-out characters, good old-fashioned investigative work and links to fascinating corners of real history make Ellis’s (pictured below) books a truly tasty crime-reading treat.

Her main man, the quick-thinking, right-thinking DI Peterson, is a trained archaeologist who eschewed digging up the past to unearth the criminals who sully his West Country patch. His sidekick at work is Gerry Heffernan, a middle-aged, overweight DCI from Liverpool who never allows a little thing like murder to ruin his pleasures, and his out-of-office, long-time pal is archaeologist Dr Neil Watson, whose commissions often lead Wesley into buried secrets and crimes.

When a body is discovered in the picturesque South Devon village of Little Rockington, Wesley is called in to investigate. The victim, Barry Brown, is a celebrity ghostwriter and the theft of his laptop suggests that the motive for murder may lie in his current work on a wartime spy story involving a beautiful young secret agent and a gallant pilot.

While Wesley investigates Barry’s famous clients, his 13-year-old son Michael coincidentally joins Neil Watson on an intriguing excavation of a crashed Second World War plane on Dartmoor. The plane was used to ferry secret agents into Europe during the war and, when three skeletons are discovered nearby, it seems the wreckage might hold more secrets than they could ever have imagined.

Before long, Wesley’s murder inquiry leads him to the same area and when he discovers a sinister history surrounding the moor and the nearby village of Moor Barton, danger from the past spills into the present. With four unexplained deaths on his hands now, can Wesley solve the mystery before anyone else is threatened?

One of the most striking elements of Ellis’s Wesley Peterson series is her ability to keep the pages turning and her readers on their toes. Resisting the temptation to overload her mysteries with clues, she instead drops small nuggets of information into the plot, barely rippling the surface of our consciousness. This devilishly clever strategy leaves little room for second-guessing the culprit and allows the finale to pack a surprising punch.

Add on stories steeped in spine-tingling atmospherics and set in intriguing locations – often incorporating gems of real history – and this is the perfect summer thriller whether you’ve read the whole series, or are discovering the wonderfully satisfying DI Wesley Peterson novels for the first time.
(Constable, hardback, £22)