The Book Folks – The Lotus Readers

When a body is found in a Norfolk Lake it falls to the serious crime team to investigate whether this is an accident, suicide or murder. It’s identified as local man Barney King, who lives close to the lake in a row of worker’s cottages. It falls under the remit of DC Anna ‘Crazy’ McArthur who starts to investigate with her small team. The duty police officer has had a look around Barney’s cluttered cottage and has found a scrawled note laid on a pile of books and post on the dining table.

“I killed her. I deserve this for what I did all those years ago”.

This intrigues Anna because it brings up questions about the note and whether this might be a serious crime case after all. When they return to the station to report to their DCI Aaron Burns they’re shocked to find a coincidence. The derelict cottage next to Barney’s was once the home of Clara Burns and her sons Callum and Aaron and she was the focus of a missing person’s case. She disappeared when her boys were asleep upstairs and her husband was in the local pub. Anna is in a difficult position, her relationship with the DCI is a known secret in the team but not to the wider force. He has never told her about his mother, leaving her to believe both parents had died a long time ago. There’s no question that Aaron must distance himself from the investigation, but should Anna? If he wants Anna to find out what happened to his mother, he will have to distance himself professionally and emotionally. Now she’s under so much pressure, with a cold case linked to Barney King’s death and the need to solve them for both personal and professional reasons. Just to make things worse she’ll have to babysit a new DCI and Chase is a bit of a conundrum. He doesn’t know the area and could be here to spy for the Chef Constable. Finally, she has to do it without Aaron by her side for emotional support and to sound out ideas with.

I live in Lincolnshire so have some knowledge of the fen areas around King’s Lynn and Wisbech. They’re not that different from central Lincolnshire, having similar geography of flat farmland and dykes dug in the 14th Century to drain the land for farming. As you drive further south, rather than barley or oil seed rape, there are fields growing flowers and vegetables. In fact there are times of the year when you open the car windows and there’s a strong smell of brassicas in the air – cabbage, sprouts and broccoli. I also know the non-PC terms the used for the villagers that the author refers to. These are isolated and sometimes insular communities, quite some distance from a town, where everybody knows each other’s business and secrets are kept for generations. This is only part of our setting, with Norfolk being DC McArthur’s patch. It’s still a rural area though where wildlife, poaching, farm thefts and firearms licences would be a normal part of police work. The serious crime teams don’t usually touch on those daily matters but they do form part of this case. Barney King is elderly, a lonely man living in the middle of nowhere with a derelict house for a neighbour. His companion is his dog, which seems to have disappeared too. He lives by poaching to top up his pension and this forms one of the team’s first questions – why would a man who owned a shotgun choose to drown himself?

The team meet some very interesting characters in the course of this investigation and the author carefully paces the secrets and lies that are uncovered. Barney’s landlord and local farmer Harry is now so unwell he has a full time carer, Luisa. His son Garrett is taking over the running of the farm. When they find out Barney had visited the neurology department at the hospital just before his death, they view the CCTV and get a surprise. Why would Garrett and Luisa be visiting the hospital together? Especially since Garrett is married to the local GP. What happened to Barney’s own family? Anna manages to track down his daughter Mags and her granddaughter. They’re a fierce pair, arguing at top volume as the police arrive. Why didn’t they have a relationship with Barney? Even stranger, why can’t Anna find the death certificate for Mag’s mother, if she died of cancer several years ago?

The author paces this really well, slowly and methodically building the case, but with spurts of heart-stopping action including a firearms incident that shows us exactly why Anna earned her ‘Crazy’ nickname. All the while there are strange and uncomfortable undercurrents. As Aaron’s brother is drawn into the case, Anna is the awkward position of being connected to him but not able to say anything. She doesn’t know how to describe what she is to Aaron – girlfriend seems the wrong word for grown-ups, but so does partner when Aaron is asking for space. Are they anything to each other any more? Then there’s DCI Chase, sent as an outsider to oversee the team on this case. He partners up with Anna who can’t work out whether he’s socially awkward or has an ulterior motive. Occasionally he seems to stray into dangerous territory and Anna thinks he must know, but she’s also sure that no one on the team will disclose her and Aaron’s relationship. I couldn’t make up my mind about him, but he definitely set me on edge. This was a really compelling case and I didn’t guess how it would turn out. I was desperate throughout to find out where Barney’s dog was though. The final attempts to secure the murderer will definitely have you on the edge of your seat. I enjoyed this and will be going back to read the first two novels in the series.

Independently Published on 9th June 2025

Meet the Author

Sadie lives in West Norfolk with her husband, two children, and demanding cat named Random. She works in the education sector, but her real passion is for writing stories with a gripping mystery, attractive setting and a host of characters to love, hate, laugh with and root for.

I jumped at the chance to read crime fiction set in my favourite city, Liverpool. I’m half Liverpudlian and half Lincolnshire Yellow Belly. It’s my mum’s home city and now it’s where my step-daughter lives while she’s at university. One of the first things I took my husband and step-daughters to see was Antony Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Beach. 100 Iron Men stare out to sea, some submerge and reappear as the tide turns and I’ve always found them eerie but moving at the same time. Here they’re the backdrop to a body being found by a dog-walker (it’s always dog walkers bless them). The body is wrapped in a bin bag, caught on one of the sculptures, else they might never have found her. The author has really captured the other-worldly feel of the place and it’s bleakness on a cold day, especially as a place to end up discarded like waste. This is DI Jordan Carr’s new case and he’s joined by a new DC, Terry Venn, who just makes it through his first post-mortem without disgracing himself. To be honest I had to swallow a couple of times as the author described peeling the face down!

The victim is a young woman by the name of Beatrice Sharp, a secretary for a printing company. She comes from Northumberland and moved to Liverpool quite recently so Jordan and his team need to understand why she’d made such a huge life change and how she’s ended up with such a terrible end, killed by blows from a hammer. The characters are slightly different from a lot of detective fiction where the main character is often old, washed up, and exhausted, with marriage or drink problems on the side. Jordan is stretched and he does work late, but his wife Penny is supportive and understanding about the pressures of his job. They have a baby boy called Harry, who Jordan absolutely dotes on. He stops and watches his son’s bedroom routine on FaceTime if he’s stuck at work and can’t be there. In his working life he comes across as thorough and by the book, keeping the over exuberant and frustrated DC Venn in check when he wants to jump the gun.

As for the setting, I don’t think you can beat Liverpool because it ranges from the tourist trail and glitzy hotels of the city centre, to the industrial Baltic Quarter and the Wirral just a tunnel away, not to mention the poorer areas – I remember Toxteth in the 1980s. The police station itself is beautifully non-descript, serves absolutely shocking coffee and often gets buried under late night takeaway containers. There are no glass boards and panoramic views here. We concentrate mostly on the case and the author sets the scene by starting with the victim. Her final moments will stay with you as the story unfolds, reminding us that this isn’t just about twists and turns and tension. This is about a young woman’s life being taken away. There’s also a narrative from a character called Ben, cleaning his van and lamenting over the sheer amount of blood. Having watched forensic programmes he’s aware he might have to torch the van because no matter how vigorously he cleans, will it really be spotless? He’d hoped just to scare her off, but it went too far. He’s also blackmailing someone, considering asking for more money and leaving his victim to stress a while. What is his connection to Beatrice and who is he blackmailing?

The case is relatively speedy, despite it’s complexity and is very tense in parts with police chases, more victims and one very agitated pregnant woman. It was a really quick read for me, because it was such a great story that shows our past can and often does catch up with us. I really did enjoy Terry Venn on his first case. He’s quite the character and could just have easily turned out to be an absolute scally. Luckily, he’s more ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’, slipping into Scouse slang when the conversation demands, great for witnesses who are reluctant to talk. I’d happily read the rest of DI Carr’s cases. I hadn’t realised at first that this is just one of his many adventures, so I’m really going to enjoy seeing his character develop from book one. This reads well as a stand alone novel and I definitely recommend this to other readers who enjoy crime fiction.

Category: The Book Folks

Murder in the Lake by Sadie Norman DC Anna McArthur No 3.

Meet the Author

Body on the Shore by Diane M. Dickson