A dark cloud casts a long shadow in this thriller from the bestselling DI Bob Willis series.
It is 1986. Assigned to a new Cold Case Unit, retired Detective Inspector Mungo ‘Bob’ Willis has reopened the investigation into the 1962 disappearance of a nine-year-old boy. Paul Bromfield was snatched from one of the last steam trains from Evercreech Junction to Burnham-on-Sea and later found dead in an abandoned bunker.
A day at the seaside turned to tragedy. And a child’s name everyone remembers.
The killer has been watching—waiting for this moment. When another child vanishes and chilling messages begin to arrive, Bob finds himself caught in a dangerous game. With time running out, he must decipher clues that have been hidden in plain sight for decades; clues that point to the lasting fallout of a forgotten nightmare.
The truth is still out there. And it’s not finished with him yet.
The series
The DI Bob Willis series steps back into the uneasy shadows of mid-1980s England, where justice feels fragile and the truth is often buried beneath official reports. At its heart is Mungo “Bob” Willis, a detective inspector forced off the front line by injury and haunted by the death of his partner. Broken in body and shaken in mind, he is a man the police hierarchy would rather forget, yet he refuses to let go when the system moves on too quickly, especially when innocent lives are at stake.
Read full series description
The stories unfold against a backdrop of roadside lay-bys, smoky pubs, and towns still adjusting to a changing Britain. Technology is limited, leads vanish into dead ends, and every breakthrough depends on instinct, legwork, and the dogged persistence of a detective who refuses to let silence settle over the guilty. Told in an intimate, often raw first-person voice, the novels pull readers directly into Bob’s fractured thoughts, where doubt and determination collide.
What makes this series resonate is not only the suspense of unsolved murders and long-buried crimes, but also the portrait of a man wrestling with his own failures while pursuing truths others have chosen to ignore. The tension builds from the small details, a radio crackling in the night, the lonely hum of the A303, a case file too neatly closed, reminders that danger lingers in the most ordinary settings.
For readers who value crime fiction with atmosphere as sharp as its puzzles, these books deliver both: gritty police procedurals grounded in a vivid sense of time and place, and a protagonist whose scars make his fight for justice feel all the more human.
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