Dead on Arrival

Laura Ackroyd, furious with DCI Michael Thackeray's dissembling, goes to London in search of career new opportunities in "the big smoke". But while an editor is keen to buy her work - and get to know her better - she witnesses a brutal murder in the East End where she is staying with a friend. To her astonishment the police show little interest in the suspects and much more in the boy's brother, a possible illegal immigrant who has vanished. Life in the capital becomes increasingly dangerous and to her surprise the case begins to pull her inexorably back to Bradfield again, where Thackeray and Mower are investigating the disappearance of a young Asian girl in mysterious circumstances. But it is not just Safi who seems to have gone missing nor just her family who are unwilling to talk to the police. The truth is more terrible, and plunges Laura into mortal danger and Kevin Mower into a personal tragedy from which he looks unlikely to recover.