The Drowning Ground
A Novel
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- 289,00 Kč
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- 289,00 Kč
Publisher Description
Out here, in the quaint ceaseless calm of an English village, it is hard to imagine a life beyond. From the outside, everything seems to make sense. Everything has its place.
My friends are open and unsuspecting. There is none of the natural suspicion of the Argentinian. . . For me, it's unbelievable in a way.
For two decades after being forced to leave his native Argentina, Detective Chief Inspector Guillermo Downes has sought tranquility in the orderly life of the English Cotswolds. But violence can strike just as suddenly in the countryside as it can in Buenos Aires.
When the body of wealthy landowner Frank Hurst is found with a pitchfork through his neck, it brings back disturbing memories of former mysteries. Hurst's wife drowned in their swimming pool-an official accident, though many villagers have their doubts. And what about the two young girls who were abducted years before, with some possible links to Hurst that were never proven?
''It's something truly terrible to make someone disappear,'' Downes tells his partner. Because the family never know, you see." Years ago he had promised the vanished girls' mothers to find their daughters, and as the ripples from Hurst's death spread through the village, there is fresh hope that he might finally make good on that promise, no matter what it costs the community or himself.
With the kind of insights into life in a seemingly peaceful village that made Broadchurch so powerful, James Marrison's The Drowning Ground introduces a terrific new voice in crime fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Something wicked is afoot in Marrison's tense debut, set in the quiet, picturesque villages of the English Cotswolds. Chief Insp. Guillermo Downes gets on the case after the discovery on a remote hillside of the body of a man with a pitchfork stuck in his throat. The victim Frank Hurst had been leading a secluded life since the death of his second wife under suspicious circumstances five years earlier. Hurst's grown daughter, Rebecca, who left home after her step-mother's death, cannot be traced. The murder, coupled with intimations that the cold cases of two missing girls may be warming up, leaves Downes with his work cut out for him. Marrison, who was educated at the University of Edinburgh and now lives in Buenos Aires, expertly evokes a sense of place through descriptions of Cotswolds life. Downes's reminiscences of his Argentinian heritage lend color. The highly unusual denouement will catch most readers by surprise.
