Okay, so the new system is still working - I'm up to "B". This is my choice from the B pile, and I've got a B review book lined up as well, but as this is one of the first debut books to win the CWA Gold Dagger for <cough> years (can't remember exactly how many but it's lots), I've been meaning to pick it up. Sometimes a system is a very good thing.
http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2010/gold.html(link is external)
From the Blurb:
Dear Mr Avery
I am looking for WP. Can you help me?
Sincerely
SL, 111 Barnstaple Road, Shipcott, Somerset.
He was only twelve, he reasoned he couldn't be expected to get stuff like writing to serial killers right first time.
Opening Lines:
Exmoor dripped with dirty bracken, rough, colour-less grass, prickly gorse and last year's heather, so black it looked as if wet fire had swept across the landscape, taking the trees with it and leaving the moor cold and exposed to face the winter unprotected.
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, Billy Peters disappeared. Everyone in town believes Billy was murdered--after all, serial killer Arnold Avery later admitted killing six other children and burying them on the same desolate moor that surrounds their small English village. Only Billy's mother is convinced he is alive. She still stands lonely guard at the front window of her home, waiting for her son to return, while her remaining family fragments around her.
But her twelve-year-old grandson Steven is determined to heal the cracks that gape between his nan, his mother, his brother, and himself. Steven desperately wants to bring his family closure, and if that means personally finding his uncle's corpse, he'll do it.