Aline Templeton

Cold in the Earth

Detective: DI Marjorie Fielding
Location: Galloway, Scotland
Time: Recent Past (Set 2003)
Genre: Scots Noir

This is the first of the DI Fielding Novels. Marjorie Fielding is a Detective Inspector based in a very rural Galloway and whose husband is a sheep farmer. The novel is set against the background of the 2003 foot and mouth epidemic with it's strain on the local community following the necessity to cull herds. It is in the process of disposing of the carcasses of a beef herd that a body is found and a murder investigation is required. 

The case is tied up with the disappearance of the long missing elder sister of an investigative journalist/psychologist who is seeking clues to her fate and the almost simultaneous disappearance of the wife of the owner of cattle farm where the elder sister had been working. The farmer's family is not without its psychological misfits.

The underlying story arc involves DI Fleming's strained relationship with her retired Police sergeant father who doesn't think policing is for women and also the trauma faced by her husband after his heard is culled.

Rating B+

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