The Sleeping and the Dead

A diver in Cranwell Lake finds what nobody has looked for in years: the body of a teenager, long dead and long forgotten. Northumberland detective Peter Porteous works back through the missing persons files and settles on Michael Grey, a secretive young man reported missing by his foster parents in 1972.

The news reaches prison officer Hannah Morton like a blow. Michael was her boyfriend, and she was with him on the night he vanished. As the investigation reopens that summer, so do the memories she has spent decades keeping shut. Ann Cleeves, creator of Vera Stanhope and the Shetland novels, builds this standalone with her usual feeling for place and for the quiet damage of the past. It suits anyone who likes a cold case where the hardest secrets belong to the people still living.