Secrets of Bodmin Moor

Fresh off closing a case in the Home Counties, DI Daniel Harcourt and DS Lucy Redgrave are loaned to Devon and Cornwall Police for a delicate assignment: a young travel vlogger, Jack Haynes, has vanished on Bodmin Moor while filming a segment on a forgotten tin mine, and the local force wants outsiders who won't mistake folklore for noise. Freelance journalist Charlie Fitz-Gerald arrives independently, tipped off by a regional contact, and the investigation unfolds along two parallel tracks: Harcourt and Redgrave working the case procedurally, Charlie working the village of Blisland from the inside.

What begins as a straightforward search quickly resists a straightforward answer. The official search grid missed the ground where Jack actually went; a witness recalls him mentioning he was "meeting someone" despite claiming to walk alone; and a local geologist reveals Jack had grown fixated, in his final calls to her, on old rumours of ritual gatherings tied to the mine.

Both threads circle a tight suspect pool inside Blisland: Michael Trethowan, the parish council chair with a self-interested planning history near the mine; Eileen Carew, the postmistress who received a mysterious parcel for Jack and won't discuss it; Edwin Trevanion, the landowner with a witnessed, explosive confrontation with Jack weeks before he disappeared; and Reverend Peter Combellack, the parish's warm, unassuming vicar, an expert in the moor's folklore and quietly dismissed by Charlie as the least likely of the four.

The investigation is pulled away from the village entirely by a stronger, more legible lead: Marcus Kilbride, Jack's estranged former business partner, owed a substantial disputed sum and caught, by phone records and ANPR, in Cornwall the night Jack vanished. Kilbride is arrested, and the case appears solved, until the evidence supporting it, a partial number plate, a fuel receipt, a hotel payment, begins to unravel under scrutiny. Someone deliberately engineered Kilbride's card and identity to point suspicion away from Blisland.

A second incident, a break-in at Charlie's lodgings, confirms someone local knows exactly how close the investigation has come. Cleared of Kilbride, Charlie and the detectives turn back to the village with new eyes. Charlie's research into parish records surfaces the true history of the Kernow Draetha Scath, a rain-ritual society believed dissolved in the 1920s but quietly kept alive by a handful of families. Independently, Harcourt and Redgrave uncover procedural evidence of a group gathering on the moor the night Jack disappeared.

Suspicion narrows through the village's suspects in turn, each looking briefly definitive before the case complicates further, until the truth resolves around Combellack: not the ambitious landowner or the guarded postmistress, but the mild, well-liked vicar, whose quiet decades-long stewardship of the old society, and a specific act of desperation to keep it from public exposure, cost Jack his life. Charlie assembles the human truth of it, motive rooted in personal desperation rather than institutional shame alone, and takes his findings to Harcourt and Redgrave rather than acting alone, allowing them to build a case that will hold. Combellack is arrested; the wider complicit group's shame unravels without each facing charges individually, proportional justice for a village more interested in restoration than retribution.

The book closes on Blisland's exhale, warmth restored, before an epilogue call from Caroline Davies signals, quietly, that Charlie's instinct is already catching on something new.