Dartmoor Burial — Audrey Peterson

A KILLER'S MUDDY PLOT

On sabbatical from her pressured university life in California, Claire Camden is looking forward to time alone in her second home in London. Her spirits are up after her divorce two years before, and at last she can get to work on her book about M. L. Talbot, one of Victorian England's most lively and daring female novelists.

But on her first visit to the country home of her ex-mother-in-law, Claire gets caught up in one young woman's tragic story. Darla Brown's pregnant body has been found on the moor, and all of Morbridge is churning with talk of the ghastly murder--gossip about Darla's flirtations and her rumored engagement to an unknown man. The old-world opinions of the neighbors--their insights into the legends of the Dartmoor region, small-town manners and scandals--are as intriguing as any fiction Claire has studied.

With Detective Superintendent Neil Padgett at her side and the wealth of all English literature before her, Claire is determined to take her own novel approach to the disturbing case...a close reading that will draw her to shocking conclusions...and into the passionate, angry mind of Darla's murderer.