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Annie Jackson, to whom we were introduced in The Murmurs (2023), has a frightening gift – she can foretell how people are going to die. She can also visualise the locations of dead bodies. One of the manifestations of her powers is also a curse. When she is inside her tiny cottage beside a Scottish locj, she hears constant murmuring voices. When she steps outside, however, these voices can be screams, or unintelligible chants. Annie has learned that this strange condition has affected women in her family going back generations.

Annie already has a certain amount of public exposure thanks to a recent case, but she is reluctantly accepted in the village near her cottage. She makes ends meet by waitressing in a cafe, and it is here, one afternoon, when the local lifeboat crew are in for their strong tea and bacon rolls that she has one of her moments of premonition. A junior member of the crew, a lad called  Lachlan, drives a car that is something of an ‘old banger’. Annie sees it wrapped round a tree, with the boy dead at the wheel. She says nothing direct by way of a warning, and when her vision turns into horrific reality, she becomes a pariah.

A member of Annie’s wider family turns to her for help. Her son Damien, a former footballer whose career was curtailed by injury, has gone missing, and she asks Annie to try to find him. Reluctantly, Annie agrees, and with the help of her twin brother Lewis, she takes on the case.

There is a parallel plot which begins in the mid 1960s, but we know it will converge with Annie’s present day travails. Two youngsters, Sylvia and Ben, are pupils at a prestigious boarding school, and they fall under the malign influence of Phineas Dance, a sadistic teacher who is also an acoylite of Satanism. Also lurking in the present day background is a sinister spectre known as the Baobhan Sith*.

*The Baobhan Sith is a female fairy in the folklore of the Scottish Highlands, though they also share certain characteristics in common with the succubus. They appear as beautiful women who seduce their victims before attacking them and killing them

As Annie and Lewis chip away at the mystery surrounding Damien’s disappearance their path crosses that of Craig Oldfield, the son of a wealthy and well-connected solicitor. Craig was a one-time friend of Damien, but is his claim that he has no idea of his former friend’s whereabouts to be trusted? We meet a a local police officer, Clare Corrigan who is initially sceptical of Annie’s special powers, and a retired academic called Dr Thomasina Hetherington, who most certainly is not. When Annie goes missing, the story heads for a dramatic conclusion in a cliff-side cave, rumoured to have once been the haunt of the legendary cannibal Sawney Bean. By now, the present day identities of Sylvia and Ben have become clear. The finale put me in mind of the glory days of my youth, reading the the sadly long forgotten novels of Dennis Wheatley  such as The Devil Rides Out (1934) in which the Duke de Richleau and his friends Simon Aron, Richard Eaton and Rex Van Ryn battled Satanic forces.

Novels that mix the paranormal with the more familiar tropes of crime fiction are more common than you might think. In the Aector McAvoy novels by David Mark it is McAvoy’s wife who has the sixth sense, and James Oswald’s DI Tony McLean often has worrying premonitions and glimpses into the ‘other world’. I once asked Phil Rickman if his wonderful diocesan exorcist Rev. Merrily Watkins always believes the people with troubled souls who reach out to her for help. His reply was along the lines of. “Not necessarily, but she believes that they believe.”

The Torments is a seriously entertaining story guaranteed to thrill even readers who – like Shakespeare’s Horatio – are initially sceptical about the existence of dark forces. It is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

Although set in a beautiful village near Cirencester, with glowing limestone cottages, a jolly white-haired vicar, and the squire’s mansion up on its hill, this is as far away from a ‘Midsomer’ type Cosy Crime as you can get. Instead it is a beautifully written tale, full of poetry, some very dark corners and people who, if not severely damaged, are fighting their own demons. Anna Deerin, a former ballerina who had to quit through ligament damage has moved to the village of Upper Magna. She lives in a grace and favour cottage in the grounds of Fallow Hall. She lives rent free because she has undertaken to work and restore what was once the Hall’s extensive kitchen garden. She keeps chickens and earns a slender living by baking cakes and selling them – and her fruit and vegetables – at the weekly farmers’ market on the village green.

She lives in a kind of self-imposed exile, with no mobile phone and no current close friends. This all changes when, while attacking a long neglected part of the garden with a pick-axe, she finds human remains. Into her life comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, another London exile. He heads up the search for the identity of the skeleton – subsequently proved to be that of a woman. Like Anna, he is a complex individual. He is deeply immersed, emotionally, in a well of sadness caused by the recent death of his mother. While he respects his elderly father, the way that his mother was treated rankles with him. Although it seems nothing unusual in Indian families, he resents the fact that his mother was just seen as a cook, child-bearer and housemaid, while her obvious intellectual and emotional talents (she was a part-time hospital administrator) seemed to count for nothing in the family home. He has little left of her now, except the fragrance of her skin and cooking – and a treasured red cardigan which he describes, chillingly, as ‘empty’.

Bonnie Burke-Patel (left) intersperses contemporary events with brief but telling episodes from 1967. We meet a young woman, living locally (almost certainly in Fallow Hall) She has a younger brother, away at university. Her mother is rather inadequate, particularly at household skills, and her father is a domineering and demanding WW2 veteran, hideously disfigured by a facial injury. One morning, she escapes into Cirencester (to buy the ingredients for her own birthday cake) and meets a young Canadian man. There is an instant attraction and, after very little courtship she, belatedly – in the time-honoured phrase – loses her virginity.

This sets up the puzzle to perfection, but the author plays her cards very close to her chest. Mid way through the book there are so many questions. Is the authoritarian father related to Lord Blackwaite, the current Lord of the Manor? Is the body in the garden his daughter? Who tried to batter their way in to Anna’s cottage a couple of nights after she uncovered the remains?

Reviewing crime novels is not particularly difficult when the books are thrillers, police procedurals or basic whodunnits. The reviewer has a few simple tasks: outline the plot, describe the characters and setting, and then describe how well the book works. I am neither a professional writer nor a journalist, and so I tend to read books that I know I will be happy with. Just occasionally, there comes a book which challenges my ability to do it justice. I Died at Fallow Hall is one such.

As I said earlier, despite the familiar rural tropes, this is something rather special. The startling violence near the end, and the emotional intensity with which Anna empathises with – and is determined to identify – the girl whose skull she cradled in her hands on that fateful autumn afternoon, sets this novel aside as something very special. Putting on my reviewer’s hat I can answer the potential readers’ question, “What do I get.” In no particular order you get a murder mystery, a grim account of the cruelties that family members can inflict on each other, a poignant study of loneliness and isolation, a gimlet-eyed look at English class structure and, above all, a testimony to the power of love. From Bedford Square Publishers, this is available now.

SO FAR: 10th August, 1954. Just after 11.00 am. In the drive leading up to the former mansion known as Arden Field just outside Grantham, the body of 24 year-old Sybil Hoy was found. She had been brutally murdered. Her body was taken away to the mortuary, and police began searching for the weapon. Just a few hundred yards away, across the Kings School playing fields, was the railway embankment that carried the London to Edinburgh main line. A railway lengthman (an employee responsible for walking a particular stretch of line checking for problems) had just climbed the embankments, and stood back as the London to Edinburgh service known as The Elizabethan Express thundered past.

What he saw as the train clattered into the distance was utterly shocking. A man sat upright on the track, and just a few yards away, on the sleepers were the man’s severed legs. The man was conscious, and able to talk. An ambulance was summoned, and he was carried down the bank and rushed to hospital. The man was John Docherty, Sybil Hoy’s former fiancée.

Docherty, minus his legs, received further corrective surgery to the amputations delivered by the LNER locomotive, but was charged with murder, by a police office sitting at his bedside. He was conducted into a succession of magistrate hearings and eventually sent to be tried at Lincoln Assizes. It was the briefest of hearings, and he was sentenced to death.

After her body had been probed and prodded by investigators, it was eventually returned to her mother and father. God, or whoever controls the heavens, was not best pleased, because a violent storm rained down on the many mourners at the Victorian Christ Church in Felling

In the long history of newspapers reporting on murders and executions, there can seldom have been a bigger gift to headline writers. The five words ‘Legless Man Sentenced To Hang’ appeared over and over again in newspapers, both regional and national. For the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd-George, himself an MP for Newcastle, the impending execution posed unique practical problems. Docherty literally could not walk to the execution chamber. He would have to be taken there in his wheelchair, and Henry Pierrepoint (or whichever executioner was appointed to the job) would have to oversee the grotesque scene of a man placed on the trapdoor, presumably sitting on his backside, hands pinioned (as was customary) and thus unable to maintain his balance. Almost inevitably, given the bizarre circumstances, the execution was called off. What became of the reprieved killer of Sybil Hoy is unclear. For citizen researchers, access to prison records via genealogy sites ends in 1951, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Docherty, born in 1926, could have been released and reached old age.

Because Docherty pleaded guilty, his state of mind and mental health was never raised in court. These days, we have too many examples of mentally ill people being free in the community to murder and maim. The Nottingham triple killer, Valdo Calocane is just one example. In Docherty’s case, his mindset was so febrile that within the space of sixty minutes or so, he inflicted nineteen ferocious knife wounds on his former fiancée, and then ran a few hundred yards to the main railway line, climbed the embankment and put himself in the path of an express train. I use those two words advisedly. People who commit suicide by train usually put the matter beyond doubt by throwing themselves bodily in front of the oncoming train. Is it possible that Docherty calculated that by just putting his legs on the line he would avoid fatal injury? We have no way of knowing. If it was a gamble, it paid off, because he evaded a date with the hangman. I have to say that if his actions were calculated, then he was an extremely devious individual.