DI Joanna Piercy
5 total works
Jakob Grimshaw has eked out a precarious living as a Staffordshire moorland farmer by selling off some of his land to Gabriel Frank, a local businessman, who seized the opportunity to build a select development of nine houses, the Prospect Farm Estate. But having been sold a rural idyll, the residents of the estate quickly realise that they do not like Grimshaw's old farm building - surely such an eyesore will mean their properties will depreciate in value? And so the war begins - complaints, petty obstruction, each inhabitant with his or her own reason for wanting Grimshaw to move away. What none of the residents realise is that the old farmer is neither simple nor honest. He has a cunning and devious nature and likes to play malicious tricks, including double-crossing the landowners around him. When Grimshaw's body is discovered at the foot of his boundary wall, his head crushed by one of the copestones, it is up to DI Joanna Piercy to unravel the events leading up to his death. But Joanna has worries of her own in her personal life and the last thing she needs on her desk is a gruesome murder investigation.
Something is amiss at a small primary school in the village of Horton. A local man, Joshua Baldwin, has been sitting in his car outside the school watching the children as they play. So DI Joanna Piercy is called out to investigate. She meets with the teachers and with Baldwin and eventually decides there is nothing to worry about. She is terribly wrong. A few days later little Madeline Wiltshaw goes missing from her home in Horton. Joanna is distraught that she trusted her gut instinct so implicitly, that she was not more suspicious of Baldwin. And the coming weeks will be a testing time for Joanna, as she desperately tries to find young Madeline. But with foot and mouth disease ruling the surrounding countryside off-limits, Joanna's task is made doubly difficult...
Struggling to keep a tight focus on her work after a miscarriage and relationship breakdown, DI Joanna Piercy resorts to formulaic solutions to solve her cases: having seen the same situations time and again, she assumes all cases have a simple repetitive answer. So when Arthur Pennington enters her office in a state of confused distress and reports that his wife Beatrice is missing, Joanna does not reciprocate his concern. Convinced that his wife is merely involved in an extra-marital affair, Joanna is dismissive of Arthur's concerns. Then Beatrice's strangled body is discovered recklessly dumped on the Leek moorlands and she is forced to re-evaluate her stance. But perhaps Joanna wasn't so far off the mark at all: it seems Beatrice suffered an unrequited love, which Joanna knows can be painful...but she never before believed it could be fatal. A baffling and intriguing mystery, Wings over the Watcher takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the maze-like puzzle of the female psyche.