Jim Kelly

A man lies hidden in an abandoned boat. Stifling 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, Declan McIlroy, a 39-year-old loner, is found frozen to death in his flat as Arctic temperatures grip the cathedral city of Ely. His is not the...

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...

Autumn, 1941. The third year of war and still the siren sounds, driving the people of Cambridge from their beds to trudge to one of the city's crowded bomb shelters. At dawn, the body of a young man is found in a shadowy corner. Everything points to suicide, but Detective Inspector Eden Brooke has his doubts given the unidentified man...

In the bleak, snowbound landscape of the Cambridgeshire Fens, a car is winched from a frozen river. Inside, locked in a block of ice, is a man's mutilated body. Later, high on Ely Cathedral, a second body is found, grotesquely riding a stone gargoyle. The decaying corpse has been there more than thirty years. When forensic evidence links both victims...

Cambridge, 1940. It is the first winter of the war, and snow is falling. When an evacuee drowns in the river, his body swept away, Detective Inspector Eden Brooke sets out to investigate what seems to be a deliberate attack. The following night, a local electronics factory is attacked, and an Irish republican slogan is left at the scene. The...

May 1942. Thousands of American GIs are stationed across eastern England building airfields to bomb Germany. Cambridge is a 'liberty town' - a hot spot for 'Yanks' on leave. DI Eden Brooke is called to the aerodrome five miles east of the city when the remains of an airman, identified by his dog tag, are uncovered as workmen extend the...