'Ben Myers is the master of English rural noir, and with Turning Blue, he has created a whole new genre: folk crime . this is by turns gripping, ghastly and unputdownable' PAUL KINGSNORTH

In the depths of winter in an isolated Yorkshire hamlet, a teenage girl, Melanie Muncy, is missing.

The elite detective unit Cold Storage dispatches its best man to investigate. DI Jim Brindle may be obsessive, taciturn and solitary, but nobody on the force is more relentless in pursuing justice. Local journalist Roddy Mace has sacrificed a high-flying career as a reporter in London to take up a role with the local newspaper. For him the Muncy case offers the chance of redemption.

Darker forces are at work than either man has realised. On a farm high above the hamlet, Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets that will shock even the hardened Brindle. Nobody knows the bleak moors and their hiding places better than him.

As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from the tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity who has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. His most recent novel, The Offing, was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club. Other works include The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. He has also published non-fiction, poetry and crime novels and his journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, Spectator, Caught By The River and many more. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.

benmyers.com / @BenMyers1