Angol
When a team of archaeologists arrives in Hartwell Stoke to excavate a Roman site on the edge of the village, the residents respond with the measured enthusiasm of people who have seen outsiders before. The dig may be significant. The disruption to the Tuesday market is certainly significant. And the questions the team keep asking about land boundaries and field ownership are, to certain ears in the village, rather more pointed than they appear.
Miss Beatrice Chalk has lived and taught in Hartwell Stoke for thirty-seven years. She knows its fields and its families, its feuds and its loyalties, and the particular silence that falls when a subject is being carefully avoided. When the project's director is found dead and the investigation moves swiftly toward the most convenient explanation, Beatrice is not convinced. Convenience, in her experience, is rarely the same thing as truth.
The archaeological team brought their own equipment, their own expertise, and, as it emerges, their own histories. The village, meanwhile, has been sitting on something rather older than Roman pottery. Some secrets keep better in the ground. Some do not keep at all.
With DI Reach conducting an investigation that is thorough in all the wrong directions, Beatrice begins her own, methodical, unhurried, and armed with three decades of local intelligence that no amount of forensic equipment can replicate.
The ground has given up one secret already. Someone in Hartwell Stoke would very much prefer it stopped there.
What the Ground Kept is the ninth book in the Thoroughly Inconvenient Deaths series, cosy mysteries with proper clues, credible suspects, and a detective who has been quietly keeping records since 1974.
