The best crime novels hit the ground running and start with a bang. Here, it’s less of a bang than a roar – that sound coming from a moorland peat fire in Staffordshire. The firefighters, trying to dig a firebreak trench disturb something:
“Two bodies lay in a bizarre parody, both horrific and romantic. They were dressed in loose, once white flowing garments, their arms wrapped around each other, her wrists bound around the man’s back with thick red cord. Their faces were pressed against each other, lips touching as though in a kiss. They looked long dead.”

DI Joanna Piercy (also known as Mrs Levin) is in charge of the case and, in a chilling reflection of the moors corpses, her husband Matthew Levin, a senior pathologist also contracted to the UN, has been summoned to the Middle East to investigate two corpses found in the Negev Desert. Given the current fraught atmosphere there, his findings will have profound political significance.

Although the dead Staffordshire couple seem to have been murdered, Masters taps into an ancient folklore image. I immediately thought of the haunting song The Drowned Lovers, where a young woman, distraught at the death of her sailor lover, throws herself into the waves to be reunited with him.

“And now every night at six bells they appear
When the moon it is shining, the sky it is clear,
These two constant lovers with all their young charms,
Rolling over and over in each other’s arms.“

Beneath the moorland bodies the police recover a strange painted stone. It is later identified as an Indalo, a shamanic symbol originating from Andalusia. The solution to the mystery of the buried lovers seems to lie in a now-abandon farmhouse, briefly leased by a New Age cult run by a man called Sam Lee. Here, Masters conjures up a beguiling mix of violent death, burial practices and ancient beliefs. The curse of COVID put an end to the hippy refuge, but where are its adherents now? Are two of them now lying in refrigerated trays in the local mortuary?

At the centre of the murder investigation is Lee, the wealthy, enigmatic and self contained man who rented out Renshaw Hall and presided over its residents, young people, most of them psychologically damaged, who were drawn there by the eternally worthless promises uttered by New Age philosophies. Lee’s overriding – and deeply cynical – motive for creating the commune was to provide himself source material for an academic thesis.

The bodies are eventually identified as those of two young people who stayed at Renshaw Hall. Piercy finds Lee unbearably insouciant, coldly indifferent to the fate of the two youngsters, but is he a killer? Priscilla Masters writes beautifully, with a keen ear for how real people talk to each other. Not the least of her achievements is to remind us that we are lucky to have a moorland landscape in England which is neither Cumbria, Northumberland, Yorkshire nor Lancashire but perhaps that most contrasting of counties – Staffordshire. It is a place that seldom features as a CriFi backdrop, but it is vividly brought to life here. Hold Me Close will be published by Joffe Books on 12th November.