Dead Ground

Detective Sergeant Washington Poe is in court fighting eviction from his beloved croft when he is summoned to a backstreet brothel in Carlisle where a man has been beaten to death with a baseball bat. As Poe and the socially awkward programmer Tilly Bradshaw delve deeper into the case they are faced with seemingly unanswerable questions: why does nothing in the victim's background check out? Why was a small ornament left at the murder scene - and why did someone on the investigation team steal it? And what is the connection to a flawlessly executed bank heist three years earlier?