I found it a riveting page turner from the start. Lilah is the daughter of a farmer who is not popular with many in the local area, and the nightmare starts for her when she finds him dead in the slurry pit one morning. As the story develops, more people come under suspicion, especially when the deaths begin to mount up.

I liked the characterisation where Lilah and her mother in particular are developed as very different people who rub each other up the wrong way, and where emotions such as shock are dealt with in a realistic and powerful way. There is also a subplot of a love interest between Lilah and Den, a police constable she once had a crush on at school.

The setting is also very well realised, certainly for the period when written (1999), obviously due to the author's own practical experience with life on a farm and looking after livestock. I've only read this author's cozy crime novels previously, but this shows that she is more than capable of producing a darker story dealing with the undercurrents of emotion and spite in a rural setting. ( )

Guy Beardon is found dead in the slurry pit on his farm. It seems to be an accident (surely nobody would commit suicide like that) until a few days later one of the two brothers next door is murdered and the other badly injured while they were sleeping.

A good quick read. ( )

Others have given a good synopsis of the plot so I will just say that the best part of this book is the descriptions of the family reactions to death and murder of a loved one. The inability to accept things, the difficulties of social interactions with people who are afraid to talk to you, suspicious of you or just plain uneasy in your presence.

I had a hard time accepting that people who suspected that the first death in the book was murder didn't tell the police about the person who was a stranger in town and had a public confrontation with the victim. Even the inveterate gossips felt this was unimportant. Huh?

Also there was an incident of a shoe in the slurry pond which no one felt the size of which could help find the killer, rather the finger was pointed at one who would have had a Cinderella ugly stepsister moment if the shoe had been tried on Arghh!

But I liked the book and would read another by this author. ( )

1 in the Den Cooper British police mystery, set in a rural area of Devon. The book seemed to be told from several different points of view, which is quite distracting. The main character actually seems to be Lilah Beardon, the daughter of the first (of several!) murder victims and we certainly get to know her quite well over the course of the book, though I felt like I hardly know the policeman, Den Cooper, at all! Den and Lilah meet when Lilah’s father Guy Beardon is found dead in his slurry pit on their farm. It’s deemed accidental until a neighbor is bludgeoned to death and his brother knocked senseless a few days later, at which time the police look more closely at Guy’s demise and believe the two deaths are related. He wasn’t well-liked in the community though he was a wonderful father to Lilah and she misses him dreadfully. More murder and mayhem ensues and Lilah is eager to help solve the crimes so their family can move on with their lives. I found this story to be a bit long and draggy with much extraneous information and too many circulating points of view. Everyone seemed to have dark and sordid secrets, and aside from Lilah and Den, there wasn’t a person who didn’t have some ulterior motives in the lot! I liked the writing style—I had picked this as one of my “weed-out weekend” books and was intrigued enough to keep reading beyond two chapters—but the book just went nowhere fast. The plot got stuck in the slurry pit with Guy Beardon, I think! LOL Anyway, this author has three different mystery series, and as this one is a short (four book) series that ended several years ago, I doubt I’ll read more of it, especially as they aren't easy to come by here; after reading this one I won't try very hard to acquire more, either. But I do have the first in another of her series here and I’ll give that a try. I’ve had this book on my shelf for ages and must admit I was disappointed in it, though there is promise here. ( )

This was a good story but it took me a while to get into enjoying it because the characters were either unremarkable or developed too slowly for my liking. May try another of her books, may not. ( )