‘The series goes from strength to strength.’ Thomas Waugh

Autumn Term 1935

Reading, England

Dr Geraint Hadley-Brown, an academic and part-time MI5 operative, accepts a lectureship at the University of Reading.

Geraint’s sweetheart Dorothea Roberts, an English student at the University of Manchester, visits him and meets Gloria Clark, an Agriculture student, whose best friend Henia Haugen has disappeared whilst working on a farm in the nearby village of Harling Green.

Henia isn’t the first young woman to go missing in Harling Green – a skeleton was found in a pond many years previously.

Geraint purchases a cottage in the village and makes plans to ask Dorothea to marry him.

Dorothea and her new friends discover some of Harling Green’s more sordid secrets and uncover a Soviet plot to kill a famous genetics professor. But where is Henia?

Meanwhile Geraint is given a dangerous assignment by MI5 and stumbles across a body. One of his seemingly nice, new neighbours is a killer.

Can Dorothea and friends save the professor from assassination, locate Henia Haugen and expose the dark underbelly of this idyllic village?

‘Pulsing with wit, bonhomie and boundless energy… A seamlessly plotted mystery in the tradition of Dorothy L Sayers and the golden age of detective fiction.’ Anna Legat