The Frozen Shroud

March 4, 2013
Edwards’s layered, atmospheric sixth Lake District mystery (after 2011’s The Hanging Wood) finds Det. Chief Insp. Hannah Scarlett, who heads the Cumbria cold-case unit, facing budget cuts that threaten to gut her division. To make things worse, her officious supervisor directs Scarlett to choose who goes and who stays. On top of that, Scarlett is adjusting to the breakup of a long-term relationship. Meanwhile, a five-year-old murder—a crime linked to another murder a century earlier—attracts Scarlett’s attention. In both murders, which occurred around Halloween, the female victim’s head was battered in, with a shroud draped over the shattered facial features. The cases were ostensibly solved, but the deaths of the main suspects before the investigations could truly be joined left some room for doubt. The creepy premise, coupled with a neat resolution, offers hope that this series will only get better.

March 15, 2013
A trio of murders spanning nearly a century poses an unusual challenge for DCI Hannah Scarlett of the Cumbria Constabulary's Cold Case Review Team--especially since one of the corpses is anything but cold. Locals still tell the story of how Gertrude Smith, the Scottish lassie whom builder Clifford Hodgkinson hired and seduced and his jealous wife, Letitia, bashed to death on Halloween soon after World War I, roams the grounds of Ravenbank as the Faceless Woman. Lately, it seems that Gertrude's ghost has a lot to answer for. Five years ago, Australian massage therapist Shenagh Moss, the wild beauty who'd thrown over married event manager Oz Knight in favor of Ravenbank owner Francis Palladino, was found dead under very similar circumstances, presumably the victim of another ex-lover, Craig Meek, who'd recently been released from prison just in time to attack Shenagh and die in a lorry accident. Hannah's friend Daniel Kind, who's evidently the most famous academic historian in the Lake District, soon takes a professional interest in the legacy of the Faceless Woman. But it takes the shocking murder of her best friend, much-married Terri Poynton, to drag Hannah into the case. Once again, there's an obvious suspect--Terri's violent ex-boyfriend Stefan Deyna--but this time Hannah and Daniel both wonder if he's really guilty and wonder too if either of the earlier killers was ever correctly identified. The ensuing investigation is more routine than usual for the detecting pair (The Hanging Wood, 2011, etc.), but Edwards does an impressive job of linking the three murders across the long years.

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