7 July 2022.
ISBN: 978-0-86154-194-2 (PBO)
The book opens telling of events a year earlier of a couple, Rachel and Pauly, taking a drug of some sort and ending up going off the cliff and falling to their deaths. It was unclear whether they committed suicide or were pushed over. Detective Inspector Georgie Strachan of the Scottish village Burrowhead police station is still trying to get to the truth.
We next learn of a Detective Sergeant Daniel Frazer of city police being sent to the village to investigate the whereabouts of an Abigail Moss who disappeared sixty years ago. A witness had come forward at the time to say she had seen a young girl – thought to be Abigail – being sacrificed on an alter like stone in the woods, but nothing had been found or proved.
Evidence then comes to light of some kind of substance being taken by the local youngsters. A group of them are taken to hospital after drinking a strange concoction. One of them, Lee is seriously ill, bringing up blood. Georgie wonders if they took the same drugs as Rachel and Pauly, but where they get it from, who is supplying? No one will supply the information.
It comes to Georgie’s notice that Rachel was trying to summon her mother from the dead at one time and the drugs were thought to be able to bring this about. Things get more macabre when Lee’s stomach contents are found to contain animal blood – lots of it. This leads Georgie to remember the slaughter of a horse carried out by Natalie, Lee’s mother.
Searching into the history of Burrowhead it becomes clear to the police that there has always been strange happenings in the village, some thought it originated because the place was built on proceeds of the slave trade.
Georgie has more than enough to cope with, she is struggling to come to terms with the fact that her husband Fergus has moved out and is living with Natalie – he insists there is nothing in it – he is just lodging there. Also, she is puzzled by the continual appearance of a little girl who keeps holding Georgie’s finger and asking her to “please help my mammy” – only she can see the little tot. Who is she?
Events come to a head when the entire village
gather on the cliff top for a ritual supposedly to save them all. They really
are not prepared for what happens.
A rather strange “other worldly” story which I
found intriguingly weird. I can see this appealing to readers who enjoy
something darkly different.
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Reviewer: Tricia Chappell
Helen Sedgwick is the author of The Comet Seekers (Harvill Secker, 2016) and The Growing Season (2017). She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University, she won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2012, and her writing has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in magazines and anthologies. Before writing her debut novel she was a research physicist, with a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University.
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