Deep Justice

Maggie Pierce’s life is in turmoil. After her quiet riverside pub was destroyed in a freak landslide, she and husband Ray take on a new pub set in an idyllic Berkshire village. The pub is everything Maggie ever dreamed of. In fact, the only blight on its otherwise perfect description is the recent, unexplained suicide of the previous landlord.
But the new environment soon provokes endless bickering, and Ray storms out, leaving Maggie to run the pub and care for her son single-handed. The quiet hostility of the local community towards outsiders, and the ominous interest of a local detective in the pub’s previous tenant begin to raise Maggie’s fears that she has made a dreadful mistake. Then she meets Greg Weston, a reticent, mildly eccentric research scientist, with an aptitude for awful cooking. Greg is devoted to his work developing vaccines at the nearby facility of biotech giant, Agrapharm, but as Maggie’s friendship with him grows, she begins to share his concern that there is a dark side to the company’s operations.
Another resident of the village, local politician Jonathan Broome, has lived in the vast shadow cast by his late father’s political renown. Determined to make his own name and his own fortune, Broome readily backstabs political colleagues to reach a senior government position. However, a nagging mystery suddenly envelops his private life. In a violent argument, Broome critically injures his mistress, Estelle. He leaves her barely alive and rushes off to attend a major Commons debate. When he returns hours later, there is no trace of her or any of his belongings. The subsequent murder of the investigator he hires to find her confirms his worst fears but leaves him none the wiser, until a blackmail note arrives, and his political demise seems certain.
The lives of Maggie, Greg, and Broome become intertwined when Greg’s research uncovers a scandal of murder and cover-ups reaching to the highest levels of Westminster. With so much now at stake, Greg knows the corporation can’t risk leaving him alive. But it’s Maggie who faces the greatest danger when a fire leads to a gruesome discovery and her identification of the killer and blackmailer.