Fear On The Levels — David Hodges

Set on the mist-shrouded Somerset Levels, this is the latest crime thriller featuring feisty Detective Sergeant Kate Lewis. Newly married to partner, Hayden Lewis, Kate returns from a disastrous honeymoon, only to be plunged into a macabre murder investigation after a teenage girl - last seen leaving a party at the height of a local scarecrow festival - is found strangled and partially stripped in her own barn. Worse still, it soon dawns on Kate that the gruesome crime is an exact copy of the 150-year old murder of peasant girl, Martha Tinney, alleged by superstitious locals to have been committed by a spectral scarecrow, nicknamed Strawfoot. As she and her colleagues desperately try to track down the copycat killer, it becomes apparent that he has no intention of stopping at just one murder, and furthermore, he has developed an unhealthy interest in Kate herself...