Hanmouth, situated where the Hand River flows into the Bristol Channel, is usually quiet and undisturbed. But it becomes the center of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. This tragic event serves to expose the range of segregated existences in the town, as spectrums of class, wealth, and lifestyle are blurred in the investigation. Behind Hanmouth's closed doors and pastoral façade, the extraordinary individual lives of the community...

Three abandoned children--Ness, who loses herself in drugs, alcohol, and fast boys; Toby, who harbors problems nobody is willing to acknowledge; and Joel, who forges a pact that sets a terrible crime into motion--become the focus of a murder investigation.

"1941 Britain: Children are vanishing from the village. Is it the powers of an ancient stone circle at work, or a modern predator? In mid-1941, children evacuated to the remote Shropshire village of Noddweir to escape the Blitz begin to vanish. It was not uncommon for city children faced with rural rigors to run away. But when retired American professor Edwin Carpenter, pursuing his study of standing stones, visits the village and discovers bloody...

When a child's bones are found near an ancient henge in the wild saltmarshes of Norfolk's north coast, Ruth Galloway, a university lecturer in forensic archaeology, is asked to date them by DCI Harry Nelson who thinks they may be the bones of a child called Lucy who has been missing for ten years.