Murder on the Moor

She walked out onto the moor at nine at night, away from every light in the valley.

Nobody does that.

Petra Ainsley - biographer, forty-three, difficult, thorough, and the cleverest woman to set foot in that valley in a lifetime - left the Black Bull by the top door on the Tuesday evening, told the landlord she would be back in an hour, and left her drink on the table.

Margo Prentice finds her on the Wednesday morning, thirty feet down in an old quarry, four hundred yards past the last waymarker.

Every single person in Haworth calls it an accident. The storm came in fast, the quarry ground is treacherous in the dark, and they are not being stupid.

They are also not explaining why she was walking uphill, away from the town, with a torch she never switched on.

A heatwave. A moor fire closing the roads. Four friends who cannot leave, in a town where forty thousand people a year visit one house and nobody looks at any of the others. And in a box of 1962 record cards listing every household in the valley, sixty-one families are accounted for and one name is missing.

Roz Kilbride is nine miles from where she grew up and is worse for it - sharper, crueller, and keeping something from the other three that Margo has already promised not to tell. Wendy Boyce reads it wrong, in writing, at length, and the reader watches her do it.

And a woman with two hundred pages of fountain pen in her notebook wrote one last word in pencil, standing up, in the rain.

"This one's a Brontë," Margo says.

MURDER ON THE MOOR is the third Gadabout Club mystery - warm, funny, fairly clued, and for readers of Richard Osman, Faith Martin and Helena Dixon. It stands entirely on its own.