PATRICK LENON

Tom Fletcher has left the police force, and its cold outside. Working as a private investigator in Cambridge, Tom is dragged back into his own troubled family history by an enigmatic message from his missing father. Somehow, he seems to be connected to the disappearance and murder of a young physics student, who was working in a hostess bar. As a massive storm tracks across Europe and begins to batter the low-lying fen country, so Toms inquiries begin to spiral into ever deeper and darker conspiracies. How is a high-tech American company involved in an officially-suppressed story from the Second World War? Where is the long-disused USAF base that seems to be the key to a centuries-old mystery, and who were the haunting, haunted sisters who played such a part in a drama that is still reaching out to claim Tom Fletcher?

It begins for Tom Fletcher with what looks like a very bloody accident in a farm machinery showroom, and reaches back into the past - his own and that of the local police force - before slamming into the present with all the force of the most up-to-date criminal power in the world. Crackling with secrets and surprises, packed with haunting landscapes and haunted characters, freighted with the hot, thundery atmosphere of a Cambridge summer and the inevitable paying-out of past betrayals, "Corn Dolls" marks the arrival of a major new crime talent.