Guilty Waters

by Priscilla Masters

Overview

The disappearance of two French girls in a Staffordshire beauty spot signals a tough new case for Detective Joanna Piercy.
Cécile Bellange is a worried mother. Her eighteen-year-old daughter Annabelle and her friend Dorothée left Paris for a summer hitchhiking holiday in England, but it’s now September and the only contact from them is a postcard sent from the picturesque setting of Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire three months ago. Meanwhile, in England, brothers Martin and James Stuart find a note from two French girls, inviting the finder to meet them at Rudyard Lake. Their enquiries lead them to Mandalay, an upmarket guesthouse where the girls stayed just before their disappearance, and its owner, the creepy peeping tom, Mr Barker. Arriving in England, Cécile Bellange meets Detective Joanna Piercy, who is looking into the girls’ disappearance. Soon Joanna must answer two important questions: what is the anxious Mr Barker trying so desperately to hide, and where are Annabelle and Dorothée?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727884619
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	03/01/2015
Series:	A Joanna Piercy Mystery , #12
Edition description:	First World Publication
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Priscilla Masters is the author of the successful ‘Martha Gunn’ series, as well as the ‘Joanna Piercy’ novels and a series of medical mysteries. She lives near the Shropshire/Staffordshire border, works part-time as a respiratory nurse in the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and has two grown-up sons and one grandson.

Editorial Reviews

01/26/2015
The Staffordshire moorlands provide the atmospheric backdrop for British author Masters’s briskly paced 12th procedural featuring Det. Insp. Joanna Piercy (after 2013’s The Final Curtain). Cécile Bellange, a French divorcée who lives outside Paris, comes to England in search of her 18-year-old daughter, Annable, and Annable’s traveling companion, Dorothée Caron. The two girls have been spending the summer hitchhiking around the country, but they have been out of touch for weeks, their last communication a postcard showing Lake Rudyard. Coincidentally, Joanna and her husband of nine months, pathologist Matthew Levin, are on holiday at Lake Rudyard, and she will soon assist in the hunt for Annabelle and Dorothée. Meanwhile, two brothers, Martin and James Stewart, find a note from the French girls inviting the note’s finder to meet them at the lake. Joanna’s domestic concerns lighten what is basically a sad, dark story. Readers will enjoy the neatly turned surprise ending. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

03/01/2015
A picturesque Staffordshire lake, named for the poet Rudyard Kipling, loses some of its luster when it's the last place two teenage French tourists are seen one summer evening. Annabelle and Dorothée left Paris to travel through England the summer before college and ended up at Rudyard Lake, where they stayed in a bed-and-breakfast run by Mr. Barker, a caretaker who could give Norman Bates a run for his money. When two local boys find a hidden note from the girls on a popular rock-climbing peak, they do a bit of amateur sleuthing before reluctantly calling DI Joanna Piercy and her team. With no bodies and only the unsubstantiated worries of the girls' mothers back in France, it's a difficult case to investigate, but Joanna's gut tells her that Annabelle and Dorothée met an unfortunate end. Juggling her new role as the wife of the local medical examiner—who wants to start a family—Joanna works tirelessly to retrace the girls' steps before the trail went cold, all the while keeping a careful eye on the squirrelly Mr. Barker. VERDICT While the plot may feel somewhat pedestrian, readers looking for a straightforward, no-frills police procedural will enjoy Masters's solid 12th series installment (after The Final Curtain).

Library Journal