Thirsty Wings

Inspector Danny Vaughan was on a downward spiral; his marriage was a bust, his kids hated him, and he was no longer the up-and-coming young prospect in the Metropolitan Police that he'd once been.  Now he was approaching alcoholism and had been shunted into a side job searching for missing people in the London area.  His life was going nowhere fast.

Then one morning one of his missing people turned up dead and it sent him on an investigation that confounded him.  Why was a man missing for a few weeks resembling a centuries old mummified cadaver?  Why was this corpse, fished out of the Thames, dry as a bone with no fluids left inside at all?  It was as if some netherworld creature had drained him dry.

His own people laughed at him, saying his imagination was getting the better of him. But the further he delved into the investigation, the more he was convinced that this was not the work of someone, but of something.

It was when the higher authorities leaned on him to stop asking questions that he became really convinced that something big was going on at top level, and that someone in the know was trying to suppress the truth, and Danny was determined to find it out, and what it had to do with a ten year old unsolved mystery in Oxford.