Here’s one for the Cornwell and Reichs fans out there.
In Simon Beckett’s new suspense novel Written in Bone, forensic expert David Hunter travels to a remote Scottish island to investigate the death of a young woman by what appears to be spontaneous combustion.
Within days, two more people are dead by fire. Hunter’s job is to coax the dead into telling their stories. At first, terrorist activity is suggested, but the answer turns out to be much closer to home.
Publishers Weekly gave this book, the second Hunter outing after The Chemistry of Death (2006), a starred review, calling it an “exceptional” thriller.
Take a sneak preview and see what you think.
The “death by spontaneous combustion” thing rang a bell with me and then I remembered why. Ken Hodgson’s offbeat Season of the Burning Souls (2006) has a corpse in a small New Mexico town suspected to have been charred in the same manner. The unfortunate proximity of the small New Mexico town (in the 1940s) to Roswell and Los Alamos would obviously tend to lend support to even the most bizarre theories.
Hodgson’s forthcoming book The Man Who Killed Shakespeare – which had a starred review in Booklist – is set even further back in time in the 1930s in another small town, Shakespeare, New Mexico, where the Last Chance Mine has long stood abandoned. A con man comes to town who promises everyone that prosperity is just around the corner for Shakespeare, and shows them expertly faked geological reports to prove it. Not likely to end well for the desperately poor, Depression weary townsfolk, I imagine.