The savage murder of Police and Crime Commissioner Lionel Hall-Hartington leaves Devon and Cornwall Police in a state of shock. The wealthy landowner and one of his employees are found shot dead at his farm, which has been ransacked, his disabled wife Helena in a locked cellar in which she is suspended upside down by a chain into an ancient well, hundreds of feet deep.
The main safe, containing the famous Bychcombe Horde of bronze artefacts, has not been breached. To Detective Inspector Jan Talantire this failure might explain the savagery of the intruders towards the woman, who is painstakingly lifted from the abyss by rescuers. Helena de Courchevel is Hall-Hartington’s second wife, a former society girl, now a wheelchair user because of multiple sclerosis.
However, this is no straightforward robbery. A bizarre Victorian-style doll from the wife’s collection was hung on the door to the cellar, and when it turns out to have genuine human hair, the trail leads to an avant-garde London based artist. Simultaneously, a former farm employee, now abroad, falls into the crosshairs of the investigation.
Attention also falls on the couple’s adopted son, Rustam, now estranged and living in London.
For Talantire this is no easy case: there are very few forensic clues, and the farm’s CCTV seems to have been disabled. There is plenty of other evidence, and lots of bloody footprints, but no obvious perpetrator. But finally, the detective makes an astonishing discovery which completely upends all her assumptions about the case.
This book, the fifth in the DI Talantire series, has been long in the gestation. I wanted to write both a ‘whodunit’ and a ‘how done it’, with an extremely forensically aware perpetrator. I’ve been toying with ideas of how I could put it all together for two to three years before I actually began in earnest on the book. In fact from the very moment that I created the police and crime commissioner for the first book in the series (five titles earlier), I knew I was going to bump him off.
One of the great joys of writing a thriller like this is the chance to delve into obscure areas of research. Until then I had no idea, for example, that there is at Woodingdean in Sussex a 1,280 foot deep well. It was dug by workhouse labour in the nineteenth century. Although the medieval well I created in this book is “only” the same depth as a twelve story building is high, I wanted the reader to imagine the terror of being suspended upside down in it, by their ankles. The darkness of this dank and claustrophobic crevice would have been immense; the only faint light from the surface no bigger than the moon appears in the night sky.
The Hanging Place, by Nick Louth, published on May 14 2026 by Canelo (ebook and paperback) and WF Howes (Audio)
