Maxwell’s fiancée Imogen is obsessed with her idyllic childhood in Cambridge, which was cut short by her parents’ deaths when she was only eight years old. She and her siblings were separated by adoption, and in adulthood she’s managed to reconnect with them all except for the youngest. When she brings Maxwell to visit, he, too, remembers Cambridge, even though he never lived there. His unexpected déjà vu forces him to consider that he may actually be Imogen’s missing brother. Worse, he fears that she may already know that he is, and be marrying him anyway.

Meanwhile, former Detective Chief Inspector Morris Keene languishes at home, struggling with a debilitating injury and post-traumatic stress. His former partner at Major Investigations, Detective Inspector Chloe Frohmann, is paired with an eager young Detective Sergeant who is all too willing to believe the worst when Morris’ daughter Dora is accused of assisting a suicide.

Literal buried skeletons discovered next to an old barn link the suicide and Imogen’s childhood, revealing horrors in the past and triggering danger in the present.

“Emily Winslow’s writing is uniquely perceptive and penetrating, inhabiting the minds of her characters with great subtlety. She is a precise and expert analyst of the darkest parts of the human psyche.” -Internationally best-selling author Sophie Hannah

FROM THE FIRST PAGE:
The digger’s caterpillar wheels stopped short of its target, a peach-coloured house with uncurtained windows and an unlocked door. Services had been disconnected; saleable materials had been salvaged. There was nothing left to do to prepare the building for razing. Erik was tempted to start the job today, to get a jump on things, but he hesitated.

Listless brown and grey rabbits dappled the field, dozens of them. They should have tensed as the digger’s vibration spread through the ground; the noise of it should have set them sprinting. But these rabbits – lumpy, swollen and blind – meandered. One headed towards the digger and Erik pitched forward in his seat as he stopped short of it.

It lolloped past, limp and with little spring.

It would have been a mercy to crush it, but too fucking disgusting Erik thought. Sweat slid from under his hard hat down the side of his nose. He jumped down from the seat. From the boot of his car he got his shotgun.

He didn’t like to shoot rabbits. Healthy ones scampered off when approached, and that was good enough for him. His garden at home didn’t have anything in it that he didn’t mind sharing.

Myxi rabbits needed killing. They were dying already, but dying in pain.

Fucking Aussies, he thought, loading a shell. They had purposely introduced myxomatosis for the express purpose of rabbit genocide. Then, fucking French. By the fifties it was in Britain and running wild.

The rabbits were stupid from pain and moved slowly. One even came towards him, labouring to push itself forward in awkward spurts. It was as if it wanted it.

The repeating noise of the gun covered the shouts. It was only in the pauses that he made out the words: ‘Stop it!’ and just ‘Stop!’ and, eventually, a wail.

Bitch should be grateful, he thought.

It was her decision to remain. The other homeowners had given in and sold. If she wanted to hold out while construction cleared and drilled and poured and hammered around her, that was her choice. She’d been made a good offer. She refused to leave.

She continued shouting at him from a window in the bright red barn. He knew that no one was home in the white house beyond the barn; it was school hours and work hours. He continued shooting.

Her fence was meaningless to the rabbits. He counted six of them on her side. He loaded and took aim. The sick ones took their deaths gratefully; the few healthy ones scattered. One dived into the blackberry bushes at the back of the barn, twisting between stems and thorns, then plunging into the soft earth, through groping roots, until it scrabbled against something hard: a pelvic bone. Nestled in that bone’s crook, a smaller, more curled skeleton was shifted upwards by the rabbit’s churning movements.

There was a flash of movement in a window of the barn, but Erik couldn’t see the old woman’s face. She must be tucked behind the curtain.
Afraid of me? Stupid cow, he thought, tears tumbling down his cheeks. He hated to shoot anything. He’d kept a rabbit when he was a boy: Milly, he remembered. She’d been soft, long-haired, fat from treats, and glossy from brushing.

He replaced the shotgun in the boot of his car and returned to the digger’s seat. He ignored the furry bodies now under his treads and scooped into the bucket; they weren’t really rabbits any more, now were they. Like Milly, they were elsewhere. Peaceful. Fuck streets of gold, he thought. His heaven was all grass.

In the ground next to the red barn, the rabbit kept digging, nudging the bones up towards the surface.