Time's Bloodied Gold — L.J. Hutton

DI Bill Scathlock thought he'd seen the last of his troubled DS, Danny Sawaski, when he recommended him for an undercover assignment â€" one Danny was well suited to since it involved infiltrating a gang of Polish people traffickers. What he wasn't expecting was to have his own sick leave interrupted by his friend Charlie pleading with him to help find Danny, who seems to have vanished from sight. With the team he was supposed to be with focusing elsewhere, Danny seems to have been forgotten, even to the extent of him losing his welfare officer â€" and that's not good. As Bill and Charlie dig deeper they find that nothing is as it seems. Danny is out on his own; the people who are being trafficked in this area don't correspond with any previous victims; and there's a medieval church with standing stones involved, if only they could figure out how. The more they dig, the stranger things become, and when Bill's friend, archaeologist Nick Robbins, gets involved, the facts he unearths seem only to make things even more confused. Who are the people who mysteriously appear at the old church at each full moon? And why is the full moon significant? Who is the strange priest involved with the gang and why does he bear the name of an Inquisitor from back in the 1830s â€" because as Bill and Nick dig deeper, it seems as though he is involved up to his neck, and they are left wondering whether the Church itself might not be involved in some way. And are all of the Polish gang as bad as they first thought? Because as Danny feels increasingly abandoned in the field he finds it ever harder to distinguish who are his friends and who his enemies. Some are clearly rotten to the core, but others turn out to be men who got swept up in the gang and who are fundamentally just good men trapped with few choices, yet can he trust them with his true identity? Alone and afraid, Danny has to make the kind of choices he never dreamed he would be confronted with â€" and it's tough distinguishing between the good and bad on both sides. As Danny gets drawn deeper into the gang, and an association with a different group trading drugs from Bristol, Bill finds the pressure mounting with each new discovery. Just how deep does a disgruntled colleagues' treachery run, and can Bill convince anyone else to help? With Danny's predicament getting ever more dangerous, the clock is ticking if Bill is to save him before he gets killed by the gang or arrested by his old colleagues.