Kate Ellis's wonderfully addictive series of West Country-set crime novels feature Wesley Peterson, one of Devon's first black detectives
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A black policeman from the Met might expect to meet some resistance, when he's transferred to a West Country seaside town?but, for DS Wesley Peterson, it's like coming home. One of the first people he bumps into is an old friend?Neil is heading an archaeological dig at a Tudor merchant's house, and Wesley has to tear himself away to become involved in a major search for a missing child. The tension is mounting when a body is found?but to Wesley's relief it is turned up at Neil's dig and is more than 400 years old. It seems to be a tragic murder nonetheless, for the bones are those of a strangled young woman and a newborn baby. When another, more recent body is found, the circumstances surrounding the child's disappearance become more complex, and Wesley is increasingly convinced that the age-old motives of jealousy, sexual obsession, and desperate longing for a child are behind the crimes?ancient and modern?that he must solve soon if further tragedy is to be averted.
