Detective Shona Oliver

Beneath the surface lie deadly secrets... DI Shona Oliver agreed to move to Dumfries with her ex-banker husband when their teenage daughter got in with a bad crowd in London. As a Glasgow native, she's back on home turf. Living on the shores of the Solway Firth allows Shona to continue as an RNLI volunteer, and a call out to recover a woman's body indicates foul play. Police in Cumbria take the case but links back to Scotland keep Shona's team involved. As they investigate, reports of people trafficking and a spate of thefts from local shops compete for attention with a large scale drug bust.

Nothing stays buried forever. Lifeboat volunteer DI Shona Oliver receives a Mayday call coming from Kilcatrin Island. Upon the beach is the badly burned body of a man, and a boy lies gravely injured nearby. Strewn around them are scores of Second World War incendiary bombs, presumably washed up by the tide from Beaufort's Dyke, an offshore arms dump deep in the Irish Sea. The dead man is a local fisherman – his son the other victim – and it rocks the tight-knit community on the shores of the Solway Firth. As lead detective, Shona has to maintain a professional distance.

With her daughter on an archaeological dig, the only bodies DI Shona Oliver expects to find are long dead. But when a corpse from the 1980s is unearthed, Shona quickly realises that it may be one of the missing “Girls in the Glen”, victim of a notorious serial killer. Shona’s superiors want her to stop looking to the past, and focus on a fresher crime scene. The attempted shooting of a local politician who likes to stoke controversy. As Shona finds herself pulled between crimes past and present, she soon realises that the secrets buried on Beild Moss are reaching into the present day.

DI Shona Oliver’s past and present collide when James McGowan, her ex-classmate–now a famous actor–comes to the area to make a Robert Burns biopic. Shona is tasked with keeping him safe during filming on an isolated island in the Solway Firth, and her job is made much harder when a dead man wearing James’s coat is found on the beach in suspicious circumstances. It seems someone wanted James out of the picture.

DI Shona Oliver watches in horror as her fellow officer is pronounced dead. PC Hayley Campbell drowns during a triathlon race in the Solway Firth. The postmortem reveals drugs in Hayley's system, perhaps self-administered performance enhancers. But a puncture wound in the back of her wetsuit suggests something darker. Shona makes slow progress on the case. There are other demands on her attention. The death of her old boss brings Shona under scrutiny. And the drug-related death of a teen at a festival–one which Becca is attending–has Shona on-edge.

A blood-soaked hammer is discovered in a lorryload of wood delivered to a local pub. DI Shona Oliver appears to have a murder weapon, but where is the victim? Then a call comes in that local forest ranger and ex-soldier John MacFarlane isn’t answering his phone. There’s no sign of MacFarlane at his cottage, and the only clue the team have to go on is a bloody trail in the snow which ends abruptly and leads to nowhere. A manhunt begins.