Synopsis: ‘The dead can’t speak to us,’ Professor Madoc had said. But that was a lie. Sometimes, only an outsider can get to the truth. Patrick has been on the outside all his life. Thoughtful, but different, infuriating even to his own mother, his life changes when he follows an obsession with death to study anatomy at university. When he uncovers a crime that everybody else was too close to see, he proves finally that he has been right all along: nothing is exactly as it seems. And that there have been many more lies closer to home…

The Judges said: “An astonishing work featuring Asperger’s sufferer Patrick with the author expertly weaving the magic first witnessed in the brilliant Blacklands, in a superbly developed plot using parallel streams to create a mesmerising and thought-provoking psychological suspense. Sometimes gruesome, sometimes comic, sometimes heart-rending but always captivating; a moving novel that will linger after the final page is regretfully turned.”

Belinda Bauer grew up in England and South Africa. She has worked as a journalist and screenwriter and her script The Locker Room earned her the Carl Foreman/Bafta Award for Young British Screenwriters. With her first novel, Blacklands, Belinda won the CWA Gold Dagger in 2010. Her second and third novels, Darkside and Finders Keepers, were highly acclaimed, and in 2013 she has already won the CWA Dagger in the Library for her entire body of work. Belinda is a repeat guest on Front Row and regularly appears at Harrogate Crime Festival. She lives in Wales.