In the bleak, snowbound landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fens, a man's mutilated body is discovered in a block of ice. High up on Ely Cathedral a second body is discovered, grotesquely riding an ancient stone gargoyle. The decaying corpse, it seems, has been there for more than thirty years. Philip Dryden, lead reporter for the local newspaper The Crow, knows he's onto a great story when forensic evidence links both victims to one terrifying crime in 1966. But the story also offers Dryden the key to a very personal mystery. Who saved his life after a car crash one foggy night two years ago—-and who left his wife, Laura, in a ditch to die? As he continues his painful visits to Laura, who has been locked in a coma ever since the accident, Dryden's search for the truth takes on ever increasing urgency. The answers will bring him face to face with his own guilt, his own fears—-and a cold and ruthless killer. This brilliant and evocative murder mystery, which was shortlisted for Britain's John Creasey Award for the best first crime novel of the year, marks Jim Kelly as the new master of suspense.

In the stifling heat wave of June 1976, an American plane crashes on the Cambridgeshire Fens, the point of impact the remote Black Bank Farm. Out of the flames walks a young woman, Maggie Beck, clutching a baby in her arms. Twenty-seven years later, Maggie is dying. Journalist Philip Dryden knows this because Maggie is lying in the hospital ward next to his wife Laura. As Maggie prepares to leave this world, Laura—-locked in a coma for four years—-appears to be slowly returning to it. And for the last few days, she has listened to Maggie's death-bed confession surrounding events on the night of the crash all those years ago. It's a confession that will blow open the murder story that Dryden is covering. But can Laura somehow communicate to her husband the shocking secrets she has learned?

Crawling on elbows and knees, a man slowly inches forward, making his way through a cramped space and suffocating darkness. He doesn't know that someone is watching, and in a flash of light, his journey is over. Now, fifty years later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is on-site at a former World War II POW camp observing an archeological dig. The archeologists are looking for buried Anglo-Saxon treasure, but the excavators have found something even more interesting—-the skeletal remains of a man trapped in an underground tunnel. The dead man's intent seems obvious, but there are two things no one can explain: The bullet hole in his forehead and the direction of the body. This prisoner was crawling in, not out. It's a puzzle that intrigues Dryden far more than it does the archeologists or the police. Meanwhile, he continues his nightly visits to the hospital where his wife, Laura, is emerging from five years in a coma. Laura can sometimes communicate through a computer now, though the process is painfully slow and erratic. When it turns out that Laura's father was involved with the POWs during the war, Dryden begins to wonder if the key may lie in long-buried family secrets. And then a second, more recent, body is discovered….

A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling his own screams, he draws a knife across his arm, letting the blood flow free. Soon he'll be dead - and life can begin again. Three decades later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is experiencing a cold, bitter Christmas on the Fens. Dryden's wife, Laura, is emerging from years in a coma, unsure if she wants to go on living. Meanwhile, people are freezing to death, among them Declan McIlroy, a 39 year old loner found dead in his flat with the windows thrown open. The police rule the death a suicide, but Dryden has his doubts - especially when he finds the body of Declan's best friend Joe frozen within a shell of ice on the doorstep of his secluded farmhouse. At the same time, Dryden is investigating allegations of abuse laid against a Catholic orphanage - a touchy subject, due to his own Catholic upbringing. The incidents seem unrelated until Dryden discovers that Declan was one of the victims. Could his death have been part of a cover-up? Soon, Dryden is picking his way along a disturbing trail of cruelty and betrayal to a brilliantly executed crime, and to a chilling, half-remembered mystery from his own childhood.

For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude's Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Government for military training. In its thousand-year-old history, it had been famous for one thing—never having recorded a single crime. But when local reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial Army on exercise in the empty village, its spotless history is literally blown apart. For the TA's shells reveal a hidden cellar beneath the old pub. And inside the cellar hangs a skeleton, a noose around its neck... Two days later, a man is pulled from the reeds in the river near Ely—he has no idea who he is or how he got there. But he knows the words 'Jude's Ferry' are important, and he knows he is afraid...

Journalist Philip Dryden is shocked to be informed by the police that his father has just been killed in a car accident, his body incinerated in a fireball of burning petrol. It's impossible - because Dryden's father drowned during the fenland floods of 1977, 35 years before. At the same time, two unrelated cases are demanding his professional attention. A body has been found hanging from an irrigation gantry in the middle of a lettuce field, the corpse riddled with bullets. The police fear they are dealing with a gang revenge killing. And a couple have come forward protesting that the local council is refusing to the return the body of their baby daughter, initially given a pauper's grave in the local cemetery. As Dryden gradually pieces the clues together, he realizes that he has stumbled on a dark secret which seems to link the three cases and stretches back many years into his own childhood. He discovers there were many things he didn't know about his late father, and that it is his fate which holds the key to the mystery.

When a reader contacts local newspaper The Crow to report a rare sighting of the Boreal or so-called 'Funeral' owl, the paper's editor Philip Dryden has a sense of foreboding. For the Funeral Owl is said to be an omen of death. It's already proving to be one of the most eventful weeks in The Crow's history. The body of a Chinese man has been discovered hanging from a cross in a churchyard in Brimstone Hill in the West Fens. The inquest into the deaths of two tramps found in a flooded ditch has unearthed some shocking findings. A series of metal thefts is plaguing the area. And PC Stokely Powell has requested Dryden's help in solving a ten-year-old cold case: a series of violent art thefts culminating in a horrifying murder. As Dryden investigates, he uncovers some curious links between the seemingly unrelated cases: it would appear the sighting of the Funeral Owl is proving prophetic in more ways than one