Ash & Bone A Frank Elder Mystery [Paperback]

In the depths of his Cornish hideaway, retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder’s solitary life is disturbed by a call from his ex-wife, telling him his seventeen-year-old daughter, Katherine, is running wild, unbalanced by the abduction and rape he feels he should have prevented. Meanwhile, in the heart of London, the takedown of a violent criminal goes badly, and Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch is uneasy about the reasons why, an uneasiness that is compounded when she starts to believe she is being stalked.
 
Maddy and Frank had a brief and clumsy encounter years before. InAsh & Bonetheir lives connect again when a second phone call persuades Elder out of retirement, only to find that a cold case has a devastating present-day impact. 

PRAISE FORASH & BONE
 
Harvey’s detectives . . . are the real deal—strong men who are sensitive enough to empathize with other people. Even people who happen to be women . . . In Elder, he has given them a champion who really does feel their pain. —The New York Times Book Review

Relentlessly hard-core. And that’s a good thing. —New York Daily News



 

MADDY BIRCH WOULD NEVER SEE THIRTY AGAIN. NOR forty either. Stepping back from the mirror, she scowled at the wrinkles that were beginning to show at the edges of her mouth and the corners of her eyes; the gray infiltrating her otherwise dark brown, almost chestnut, hair. Next birthday she would be forty-four. Forty-four and a detective sergeant attached to SO7, Serious and Organized Crime. A few hundred in the bank and a mortgaged flat in the part of Upper Holloway that North London estate agents got away with calling Highgate Borders. Not a lot to show for half a lifetime on the force. Wrinkles aside.

Slipping a scarlet band from her pocket, she pulled her hair sharply back and twisted the banl3A