The Shrike's Garden
The hearse had gone, and in its wake the silence of Blackwood Hollow settled back into the streets like pond water closing over a dropped stone. So begins the unravelling of a village that has carried its dead with care for generations, and is now being taught to fear them. Maren Voss has spent her life in the company of the departed, raised above Quill and Sons, Funeral Directors, where her father Jonas keeps the ledger and her sister Iris lays out the bodies with reverent hands. She knows the rituals of grief, the quiet politics of a fellside community, and the long memory of families like her own. So when a stranger's corpse vanishes from the parlour before it can be named, she understands the violation for what it is: not theft, but the first cut in something deliberate. The investigation draws her into uneasy alliance with Detective Declan Ashworth, whose suspicion settles too comfortably on the wrong shoulders, and across the path of Hollis Crane, a folklorist cataloguing the old wives' tales the fells keep. As winter presses in, more bodies go missing from more parlours, each one replaced, in some quiet thicket above the village, by something hung on thorns. The shrike, the villagers say, was never just a bird. With Edda Voss refusing to speak of what she saw the night the first body disappeared, Tobias Marsh selling off parcels of land no one should want, and Cyrus Vale arriving in town with questions of his own, Maren must decide whether the killer is a stranger to Blackwood Hollow, or whether the family's oldest grief is finally blooming in plain sight. By the time the frost thaws, someone will have to bury what really happened. The only question is whether the grave will hold.