A Common Source

A woman walks home through the Liverpool dockland rain and does not arrive. She is the first. She will not be the last.

DCI Toni Holden has spent twenty-three years entering other people's houses uninvited. She has a rule: find the photograph before the body, say the name before the case number. Kelly Traynor was thirty-one, a mother, quick to laugh. Toni will not let her become a statistic.

As the bodies accumulate, the forensic evidence delivers a suspect, cleanly and certainly, and a man is charged. The case is closed to everyone's satisfaction but Toni's. Because buried in the DNA is a single anomaly the prosecution would rather she left alone. Something the science says is impossible. Something that means the story everyone has agreed to tell is wrong from the first line.

The evidence does not lie. But evidence is only ever half of it. Someone has built a story on top of these deaths so patient, so intimate, so quietly monstrous, that the truth has been hiding in the one place no one thought to look.

To find it, Toni will have to take apart the tidiest confession of her career, and ask who really benefits when a case is allowed to close.

A Common Source is the first DCI Toni Holden novel: a humane, forensically exact Merseyside procedural about grief, control, and who gets to narrate a life.