‘Deadman’s Pool by Kate Rhodes

Published by Orenda Books,
25 September 2025. 
ISBN: 978-1-916788-66-4 (PB)

The Scilly Isles are now in serious competition with Shetland, Oxford and the Peak District for the title of most dangerous of the UK’s picturesque places. The body count rises with each new book in Kate Rhodes’s gripping series, and in Deadman’s Pool the race is on to stop it growing even further. The body of a young girl is found in a shallow grave on the small, uninhabited island of St Helen’s. Then a baby only a couple of weeks old is found, barely alive, and it soon becomes plain that another girl may be trapped or imprisoned somewhere in the Scillies. The race to save a life is on for Detective Inspector Ben Kitto and his team.

To Ben’s surprise, his boss, Chief of Police Madron, starts behaving oddly. His boat was seen close to St Helen’s just before the body was discovered, but he refuses to talk about it. And it’s evident that a group of young people know more than they are saying. The same is true of several adults in prominent positions, and Ben is soon struggling to find any useful information. He relies heavily on the forensic evidence, and fortunately Liz Gannick, the irascible (and disabled, but she doesn’t let that hamper her) expert from the mainland, unearths a wealth of it.

The dead girl and the baby are related, and both have Vietnamese heritage. This opens up a whole new line of enquiry; the islands have been used by people traffickers, and Deadman’s Pool, a relatively calm stretch of water close to St Helen’s, has been the scene of dinghy-loads of people abandoned by their captors.

It all happens against a backcloth of winter in the Scillies: high winds, treacherous seas, one storm after another. Even reading during the warmest summer in decades, Kate Rhodes’s skill with atmosphere made me glad of four stout walls around me and a sweater within reach. Into that evocative background she weaves details of everyday winter life in a popular summer holiday venue: empty hotels, derelict buildings abandoned by people who thought they’d make second homes, discontented young people, protective parents.   

The characters are the kind who make you want to come back and meet them again in future episodes: Ben’s colleagues, sparky Isla, taciturn Lawrie and observant Eddie; his family, reticent Uncle Ray, calm wife Nina and adorable one-year-old Noah, who charms even short-tempered Liz Gannick. The islanders too, young and adult, are all living, breathing individuals.

Dipping into a new book in a well-wrought series is like meeting up with old friends, and there are plenty of other reasons to read the Isles of Scilly mysteries too; the twists, turns, dead ends and surprises in Deadman’s Pool are only a few of them. I’ve enjoyed watching Ben Kitto’s career and personal life develop, and the other characters grow and evolve, and look forward to meeting them all again before long. 
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Kate Rhodes was born in London. She has a PhD in modern American literature and has taught English at British and American universities. She spent several years working in the southern states of America, first in Texas, then at a liberal arts college in Florida. Kate’s first collection of poems Reversal was published in 2005, her second collection, The Alice Trap was published in 2008. The Guardian described her poems as “pared back and fast-moving, the short lines full of an energetic lightness of touch”. Kate has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship, and her poems have been shortlisted and won prizes in a number of competitions including the Bridport Prize and the Forward Prize. Crossbones Yard was Kate’s first crime novel. Hell Bay was the first of a new series featuring DI Ben Kitto, set in the Isles of Scilly. There are now eight books in the series. Kate lives in Cambridge with her husband Dave Pescod, a writer and film maker. 

katerhodes.org  

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 on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.