Nicola was in a bind. She'd been hired as the Detective Sergeant for the Wessex police department, which had morphed into all of Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. She had been promised a full staff, but only got two detectives-one of them not field trained. Even the new police building was way behind being built and she and her small crew were shoe-horned into a vacant bank building. One of her detectives, Mel, refused to go out in the field but was very comfortable with archival and technological evidence. Harry, the other, hired as a "life experience" applicant, was untested and Nicola had no time to babysit him. That he was easy on the eyes certainly didn't help her tenuous marriage situation. But none of that mattered now-her new job was on the line, and she'd better get to it.
For whatever the reason Nicola Bridge decided to give up her big city career in Liverpool to take a detective job in Devon, she was sorely needed now. One night, a man driving on a country road overlooking the coastline, lost control of his car and hit something. Not a deer, but it had antlers on its head and was tied to a chair in the middle of the road. Called to the scene around 4 am, she was met by the regular police who had secured the area. By his morbidity and wounds, it was easy to determine that the victim did not die there, but had been moved to the road. When Nicola asked if anything on the body could help ID the man in the chair, the police answered, formally no, but we already know who he is.
The victim, Jim Tiernan, ran the local pub, the White Hart, and had brought it back from moribund to a growing concern. One of the two pubs in the village, the White Hart was the more traditional, while the Fox served upscale food and catered to tourists. There was a bitter rivalry between them for the scant euros to be made. Did Tiernan's troubles revolve around cash flow problems, his womanizing ways, or something more sinister? And why did this murder invoke the killings of 1925, when three townsfolk were found dead in the road, bound in chairs, with antlers tied around their heads.
Chibnall, author of the novel and British TV series, Broadchurch, nails the gloomy, desperate atmosphere of the West Country and its local characters. Finding out who the killer is takes second place to the way the village personalities interact and attempt to evade justice. Will Nicola and her detectives find the answers to this quandary...brew a cuppa and find out.
Reviewed by Donna Ballard
June 10, 2025
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