The best-written crime novel of the year
Read the opening pages below
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Upper Magna in autumn is a world purified by fire. The leaves are a blaze of forest and crimson, and sweep across the landscape, reaching up into the sky from skeleton fingers, carpeting the paths underfoot. Against the burning, dropping leaves, the air is fresh and cold. Behind such clarity, there is the faintness of woodsmoke and sweet rot. Everything is clean, stark, beautiful not in its beginning but its end.
From Fallow Cottage, the land rolls outwards, a carpet that at first looks endless. The garden used to extend beyond the horizon too, before parcels of land were sold to the neighbouring farmer. At the doorstep of the cottage is the kitchen garden, thick with the harvest season, behind its walls, the orchard, the rose arbour, and from there, the mad tumble of the wildflower meadow. In the hollow, below everything else, is the stream, a hem of woodland, and rising up again on the opposite hill, Fallow Hall watches everything.
From the cottage, Anna Deerin looks out on the garden like a first love, pulls down the sleeves of her jumper, and puts her tools in the wheelbarrow. Her elbow aches as she lifts it and steers it towards the farthest corner of the kitchen garden. This work has echoed in strange ways across her body – strains in muscles she never used in her past life; the rust and microbes in the soil sometimes staining patches on her hands, and when, come the evening, she strips her sweaty clothes off and into the machine, her body is oddly patched; milk-pale from sternum to ankle, but golden and freckled on the back of her neck, and her arms and hands, like she is wearing long gloves to a ball.
More information on the book »
The shortlist for the 2025 Dagger Award for best crime novel
A Divine Fury by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
The Bell Tower by R.J. Ellory (Orion)
The Hunter by Tana French (Penguin Books Ltd)
Guide Me Home by Attica Locke (Profile Books Ltd)
Book of Secrets by Anna Mazzola (Orion)
I Died at Fallow Hall by Bonnie Burke-Patel (Bedford Square Publishers)
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