Turning blue

The depths of winter in the isolated Yorkshire Dales and a teenage girl is missing.

Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets. Nobody knows the bleak moors better than him, or their hiding places.

Obsessive, taciturn and solitary, DS Brindle is relentless in pursuing justice.

But he is not alone in his growing preoccupation with the case.

Local journalist Roddy Mace has moved north from London to build a new life.

Can this assignment be his redemption? As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity and fixture of the nation's Saturday-night TV. 'Lovely Larry' Lister has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.

A tour de force of plotting and atmosphere, 'Turning Blue' is a terrifying, gripping tale of hidden lives, and hidden deaths."A queasily compulsive evocation of a wild and brutal Yorkshire landscape, informed and haunted in equal measure by the shades of Jimmy Savile and his monstrous deeds and the East Riding's lost boy of crime fiction, Ted Lewis." Cathi Unsworth, author of 'Without the Moon' and 'Weirdo'."Ben Myers is the master of English rural noir and with 'Turning Blue' he has created a whole new genre: folk crime.

It is by turns gripping, ghastly and unputdownable. I'm already looking forward to the sequel." Paul Kingsnorth, author of 'The Wake' and 'Beast'.