It’s a long, hot summer in the Peak District, but the blue skies are darkened by police helicopters and the sound of birdsong is drowned out by the increasing hysteria of a full-scale search operation for a missing teenage girl. Laura Vernon is smart, sexy and the keeper of many secrets, but now she’s lying dead in a thicket in the heart of the country.

Harry Dickinson found the body, but what instincts make him so bent on obstructing the police investigation into Laura’s murder? And what do he and his two fellow retired lead miners find to talk about on those long, balmy nights in the pub, hunched over their game of dominoes?

Graham Vernon is a man who knows all about secrets, and the police are at a loss to understand the attitude of this powerful businessman and his glamorous wife to the death of their precious daughter. The Vernons are holding something back. But what could be more important that the discovery of Laura’s brutal murderer?

Ben Cooper, a young Detective Constable living with tragedy, has known the villagers all his life, but his instinctive feelings about the case are called into question by the arrival of Diane Fry, a ruthlessly ambitious DC from outside the division. As Ben and Diane take the first steps in a complicated dance of suspicion, attraction and frustration, they discover that to understand the present, they must also understand the past — and in a world where no one is entirely innocent, pain and suffering can be the only outcome.

A death in the rural family-from-hell bring Fry and Cooper to a remote and unfriendly community in the fourth psychological Peak District thriller.

It’s nearly May Day and deep in the Dark Peak lies the village of Withens. Not a tranquil place but one troubled by theft, vandalism, strange disappearances and now murder. A young man is killed — battered to death and left high on the desolate moors for the crows to find.

Ben Cooper, part of the investigating team, meets an impenetrable wall of silence from the man’s relatives who form Withens’ oldest family. The Oxleys are descendants of the first workers who tunnelled beneath the Peak. They stick to their own area, pass on secret knowledge through the generations, and guard their traditions from outsiders.

Detective Diane Fry is in Withens on other business — looking into the disappearance of Emma Renshaw. The student vanished into thin air two years ago, but her parents are convinced she is still alive and act accordingly... which doesn’t help Fry in her efforts to re-open the case following an ominous discovery in remote countryside.

But there are other secrets in Withens and more violence to come... The past is stretching its shadow over the present, not just for the inhabitants of Withens but for Cooper and Fry as well.

How do you prove a murder without a body?

Ten years ago, Reece Bower was accused of killing his wife, a crime he always denied. Extensive police searches near his home in Bakewell found no trace of Annette Bower’s remains, and the case against him collapsed.

But now memories of the original investigation have been resurrected for Detective Inspector Ben Cooper — because Reece Bower himself has disappeared, and his new wife wants answers.

Cooper can’t call on the Major Crime Unit and DS Diane Fry for help unless he can prove a murder took place — impossible without a body. As his search moves into the caves and abandoned mines in the isolated depths of Lathkilldale, the question is: who would want revenge for the death of Annette Bower?

The mountain of Kinder Scout offers the most incredible views of the Peak District, but when thick fog descends there on a walking party led by enigmatic Darius Roth, this spectacular landscape is turned into a death trap that claims a life.

For DI Ben Cooper however, something about the way Faith Matthew fell to her death suggests it was no accident, and he quickly discovers more than one of the hikers may have had reason to murder their companion.

To make things worse, his old colleague DS Diane Fry finds herself at centre of an internal investigations storm that threatens to drag Cooper down with it.