D. S. Butler

Every instinct is screaming at her that something is wrong. ‘Lorraine?’ The door stands open, the kettle cold, the house dark and silent. Behind an overturned chair, she sees a figure on the floor. Rushing forward, a gasp of fear escapes Karen’s chest: her future mother-in-law will never open her eyes again…DS Karen Hart’s happy world is shattered the moment she finds her fiancé Mike’s mother murdered on what should have been a night of celebration. And even worse, someone has sewn the soft skin around Lorraine’s eyes shut…Karen’s entire soul aches to uncover Lorraine’s killer. But her team cannot let her be a part of the investigation, and she is forced to watch from the sidelines. Every clue haunts her: the page mysteriously torn from Lorraine’s address book, the whispers about Lorraine’s troubled history. Then another of Mike’s relatives is found dead—eyes sewn shut in the same horrifying way. Karen is sure the key to this case lies in Mike’s family, but as she gets closer to the truth, the killer’s attention turns to her. Now she must solve this case alone before someone else she loves becomes the next victim—and before the killer closes Karen’s own eyes forever…This book can be read as a standalone.

A medieval torture device. An archaeological dig. Can DS Karen Hart unearth the truth?In the dead of night, four teenagers taking a shortcut through an archaeological dig site find a woman?s lifeless body in a muddy trench, her hands and neck locked in a medieval device known as a Shrew?s Fiddle. It doesn?t take long to see that these are no ancient remains: the woman was killed just hours earlier.Called in to unearth the truth, DS Karen Hart learns that the victim, local woman Alison Poulson, was unpopular with the archaeologists and the TV crew filming the excavation. Digging further, she finds bitter colleagues, an angry farmer and an oddly unmoved husband. Then there?s the teenage girl who found the body, who seems to know more than she?s letting on?After a second murder rocks the investigation, it seems the killer will stop at nothing to cover their tracks. Can Karen unravel the mystery before another life is lost?