Dying for Love [Hardcover]

'This is a thriller written with sprightly élan.'

Culchet is everyone's idea of the idyllic Lake District village, with geese on its tree-shaded green and friendly, well behaved residents going quietly about their business: Bart Milburn is doing up the Old Hall, the gourmet chef at the pub is preparing for an anniversary party, her friend Alice in the back garden is reviewing a crime thriller, its violence the very antithesis of Culchet as it dozes through an early heatwave. Then, without warning that peace is shattered. Two deaths occur within a short space of time, both too sudden and unusual to be deemed accidents. And when five-year-old Kim Butler disappears, everyone knows what that means - there has to be a kidnapper, or worse, living a seemingly respectable life in the village, pulling the wool over all their eyes. Panic erupts, vigilante groups are formed, and quietly, insidiously, blackmallers come out of the woodwork. And all the time, unsuspected in this pretty, sleepy village where nothing ever happens, volcanic passions are waiting to erupt: driven by a lust for power, for possessions, and for merciless and fatal love.

This novel is set in the border country where Scots and English raided for centuries, committing atrocities that would be war crimes today and leaving the land reeking with blood and smoke. On the face of it everything changed. Nowadays cosy pubs sell real ale to discerning tourists and employ gourmet chefs, decrepit houses are restored by loving owners, fat geese graze village greens where quaint cottages are lush with clematis and roses. This is the Garden of Eden and that is the appearance, but Moffat is from farming stock; she has lived for most of her life in wild and wilderness country and her antannae are charged in every isolated village. As Sherlock Holmes pointed out: 'the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.'