‘Cold in The Earth’ by Thorne Moore

Published by Diamond Crime,
22 October 2024.
ISBN: 1-91564943-0 (PB)

Picking up a new book by Thorne Moore guarantees two things: a rattling good story, and a quality of writing which carries you along and ensures you don’t want to stop reading it till the last page. Add to that characters you warm to and want to know more about, locations that spring off the page, and an approach to crime fiction quite unlike any I’ve encountered elsewhere, and it’s one of those indefinable mysteries why her books aren’t top of the bestseller lists.

Cold in the Earth follows ex-policewoman Rosanna Quillan as she sets off to track down a woman who holds the key to the whereabouts of four, possibly five bodies of young girls murdered nearly twenty years ago by Timothy Gittings. The killer was caught, and sentenced to life in a secure hospital, but the families of the girls are broken, and want to bring their daughters home to be buried. 

Gittings’s mother has disappeared, but she was fiercely protective of her son at the time of the murders, and Rosanna is soon convinced that she knows more than she ever said. Her quest is to trace the woman and persuade her to talk before the mother of one of the girls dies of cancer. The search takes her to rural Lincolnshire and a tiny, remote Welsh village, close to where the girls were killed.  

Thorne Moore’s books are full of intriguing characters and Rosanna Quillan is one of the most fascinating yet. On the surface she is ordinary, but she reveals imagination, resourcefulness, tenacity... the list goes on and on. Despite a promising start to a career in the police, she abandoned the force because crime-solving and administering justice seemed to take second place to box-ticking. She isn’t above a bit of minor crime herself, when it serves a higher purpose. 

Then there’s Gethin Matthews, who has exchanged city life for sheep farming when his father develops Alzheimer’s; and retired detective Malcolm Cannell, who investigated the murders and put Gittings away, but has never forgiven himself for not finding the bodies. I especially enjoyed his feisty wife Barbara, who is quite willing to co-operate with Rosanna, and even to push Malcolm outside the boundaries of the Law. 

The places Thorne Moore creates are as fully realized as the people. The contrast between the dank cottage Rosanna rents and the warm, welcoming Matthews farmhouse sharpens the image of both; and I could almost trace Rosanna’s steps and feel her desperate frustration when she ventures out into a vicious storm, and finds herself thwarted by a flooded bridge.   

Happy endings are impossible in this kind of story, but you’ll be relieved to know that it finishes with a ray of hope. But how Rosanna arrives at that point, and where she might possibly go next? For that you’ll have to read the whole book. And believe me, at two in the morning because you couldn’t put it down till the last page, you’ll be glad you did.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Thorne Moore grew up in Luton, near London, but has lived in Pembrokeshire in West Wales for the last 35 years. She writes psychological crime, or domestic noir, with an historical twist, focusing on the cause and consequences of crimes rather than on the details of the crimes themselves. A Time For Silence, set in Pembrokeshire, was published by Honno in 2012. It was followed by Motherlove and The Unravelling, set partly in a fictional version of Luton. Shadows, published by Endeavour in 2017, is set in an old house in Pembrokeshire, and is paired with Long Shadows, which explained the history and mysteries of the same house from Medieval times to the late Victorian period. 

https://www.thornemoore.co.uk/  

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.