Disturbing, atmospheric suspense novel from the author of Only Darkness: 'Dark, edgy and compelling, this is a first novel from a writer to watch' TheTimes Snake Pass, the Peak District: The car of Gemma Wishart, a young researcher in Russian languages, is discovered, abandoned, by a walker; the driver has vanished without trace. Over in Hull, the body of a woman is discovered battered to death in a hotel bathroom; the only clue to her identity is a card bearing the name of an escort agency notorious for its suspected trafficking in Eastern European prostitutes. For Detective Inspector Lynne Jordan, the missing academic and the murder victim have a tenuous connection. Jordan is in charge of a police operation to stamp out the illegal trade in human flesh and Wishart was helping her with transcripts of an interview with one such woman, who has subsequently turned up dead in the Humber Estuary. But it's possible there is another, even darker, force at work, and when two more bodies turn up, Lynne is forced to conclude there may be a serial killer on the loose.
Danuta Reah who also writes as Carla Banks grew up with stories. Her father, a Belarusian cavalry officer, kept his past alive by telling his children stories of his childhood in the forests of Eastern Europe. She lives in South Yorkshire and uses her urban background in her books. The settings range from the claustrophobic parochialism of the South Yorkshire mining communities to the international stage of new Europe and beyond. Her most recent book, Strangers, is set in the ex-pat community in Saudi Arabia. Crime - or at least dissent - runs in the family. One of her ancestors, John Woodcock, was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1646 for his religious beliefs.
In 2005, she won the Crime Writers' Association Short Story Dagger for her story No Flies on Frank.
Books: Fiction. Writing as Danuta Reah: Only Darkness, Silent Playgrounds (published in the US as Listen to the Shadows), Night Angels, Bleak Water
Writing as Carla Banks: The Forest of Souls, Strangers
Non-Fiction
The Language of Newspapers, Working with Texts
