Beneath the Moss: A Novel of Turclossie

A windfarm access road opens a peat moss that has kept its own counsel for centuries, and gives up a young man who has been lying there for forty-three years. In 1986 Tam Vasari went to Canada. The postcards said so. His family kept them in a biscuit tin and read them until the ink went soft. He never went anywhere. When the moss bailiff recognises the buckle on the body and takes what he knows to the one door in the parish everybody trusts, he is dead inside a week under his own quad bike, on ground he had crossed every day of his life. Detective Inspector Cormac Buchan cut peats on this moss as a boy, on his grandfather's bank, three banks from a grave nobody knew was there. He knows how a moss man works a bank and how a townsman digs a hole. He knows the parish will close around its own. And he knows, as his wife puts it, that nobody ever audits the kind ones. The fourth of the DI Cormac Buchan Investigations: a cold case, a village that forgave itself, and a detective who simply keeps counting.