Goat farmer, cheese maker and weaver Tristan Smith is working on her North Yorkshire smallholding when a chance visit by archaeologists exposes a skeleton in an abandoned WW2 bunker. But it's not a wartime casualty.
Tristan becomes involved in the search for the truth about her predecessors, as DI Greg Geldard follows a trail from North Yorkshire to the Norfolk Broads. He is seeking justice for a long-dead victim; but another casualty is hunting for a new life and a safe place to start again.
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The sealed van clanked wearily round the lanes to the outskirts of the village, then turned up the track to the rough grazing the villagers called 'The Coombes'. PRELUDE, YORKSHIRE, AUGUST 1940
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(@SilverWoodBooks, 3 February 2021, 210 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed, #BlogTour 22 March via @RandomTTours)
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This is the author's debut and the first in a series. I really enjoyed Secret Places and would definitely check out the next book. I enjoyed the setting of the book, Yorkshire and Norfolk Broads, for some reason I've read a lot of thrillers and crime fiction set in and around both places, remind me not to visit without a weapon of some kind and never venture out alone. The title of the book is what got my attention, harking back to my childhood when I carved my own secret places in the world alone and with friends, though a different kind of secret place is the focus of the book. I got pulled into the book from the start and it gripped me until the final page.
