Heather Peck

BURIED IN THE PAST . . . Between the covers

Heather Peck’s Greg Geldard books are, as far as I am aware, unique in that they operate almost as serials, with at least one case continuing from the previous novel, alongside a new investigation. The previous novel Beyond Closed Doors (click for more details) dealt with the troubling case of two children going missing, after their mother was murdered by their father. The book ended with Kate and Jake Mirren being held captive by a reclusive woman in a perfectly ordinary village bungalow. She feeds them well, and looks after them, but they are not free to leave the room in which are confined. The case weighs heavily on Geldard’s mind, as his boss and other senior officers having metaphorically, at least, ticked the box marked ‘missing, presumed dead’.

One of the plotlines here is centred on the vexatious pursuit of hare coursing. Far from the open fields of East Anglia, it has a long history, and in some countries it is regulated and controlled by official bodies, and is regarded as a sport for the gentry. Here, it is very different. It has been illegal since 2004, and is, at least in my backyard, largely carried out by those who, in polite speech, are known as ‘The Travelling Community.’ As I write this, villages not far from me are still reeling from the havoc caused a few days ago by a convoy of twenty five four-by-four vehicles, driven by balaclava clad men, cutting a swathe of destruction across fields and property and leaving burnt out vehicles in their wake. In this novel, farmers who try to disrupt the activity become victims of violence and arson. When a farm worker dies from a blast caused by one of the arson attacks, this becomes a murder investigation.

While this carries on, hampered by Covid restrictions, Heather Peck focuses on the strange case of the Mirren children. We know they are still alive, but the mystery is why the woman who has, albeit benevolently, imprisoned them in the first place. The apparently inoffensive and ordinary bungalow becomes the scene of something much more dramatic towards the end of the book, when Heather Peck cleverly weaves in a story line which she introduced in the early pages, buy appeared to have no apparent connection with the events in East Anglia.

Like many readers, I always want my crime stories to have a definite and developed sense of place, and Heather Peck definitely doesn’t let us down. In my case, it helps that Greg Geldof’s stamping ground is not too far away from where I live, and I can appreciate the depth of knowledge and fondness for the fields and waterways of Norfolk and Suffolk which are embedded in the story. Buried In The Past is as enthralling and addictive a police thriller as you could wish to read. It is published by Ormesby Publishing, and is available now. Incidentally, the book ends, as all good serials should, by leaving us in suspense after Geldard suffers a harrowing few days, but I have blacked out the final words to avoid a spoiler!

February 4, 2025 0

BEYOND CLOSED DOORS . . . Between the covers

This enjoyable police procedural novel is the sixth in the series (to read reviews of the previous two, click this link) following the career of Norfolk copper Detective Chief Inspector Greg Geldard, his girlfriend Detective Sergeant Chris Mathews, and the rest of their team. These novels pretty much follow on from each other, and in the previous book Geldard battled a violent Lithuanian gangster called Constantin Gabrys. Now, it’s March 2020, Gabrys is serving a long prison sentence and his psychotic son is dead. However, all is not well, because a key figure in the case, now under witness protection has been attacked. He survived, but a police officer has been seriously injured, and it is obvious that the leak of information can only have come from within the police forced itself.

Despite the Gabrys empire having been apparently dismantled, their poisonous legacy hangs over Norfolk like a miasma. Norfolk, I hear you ask? Surely not that wonderful holiday destination with its abundant wildlife, historic homes and beautiful coastline? While the entire county might not be a wretched hive of scum and villainy, there are places – like Yarmouth and Gorleston – which suffer deep deprivation, and are consequently ripe feeding grounds for organised criminals, whether imported from Eastern Europe or of the home-grown variety.

Geldard traces the leak to a civilian police secretarial worker, but is dismayed to learn that part of the conspiracy involves Helen Gabrys, a member of the family he thought to have been as innocent of wrong doing as she was disgusted at her father’s career.

You will notice in the first paragraph that the story is set in March 2020. Remember that? As the country begins to shut down against the ravages of Covid, life just gets more difficult for Geldard and his team. Right across the criminal justice system things are starting to unravel. Court backlogs become years rather than months, prisons are struggling with absent staff, and the police themselves have to try to hold important conversations yards apart from each other. As the cover blurb suggests, however, the streets may be nearly empty, but evil is just as happy within four walls as out in public places.

There is a parallel thread in the story, which I found unsettling and hard to read. In Yarmouth live the Mirren family. Children Karen and Jake don’t have the happiest lives. Their mum is well-meaning, but weak, and browbeaten by her brutish husband. Karen has a place where she feels valued, can be herself and feel comfortable with trusted adults. It is her primary school, and when it shuts, forcing all the children to stay at home, it is a life sentence for the little girl. The reason this part of the novel affected me is that I taught in Norfolk for over thirty years, and for the latter part of that I led Safeguarding, and the scenes that Heather Peck describes were uncomfortably familiar.

When tragedy strikes in the Mirren house, the subsequent events become very much the concern of Greg Geldard, and he has to add a significant missing persons search to his mounting caseload. In the best traditions of great Victorian writers like Dickens and Hardy, who serialised their novels in popular magazines prior to publishing them in their entirety, Heather Peck leaves us on a knife edge, eagerly awaiting the next novel in this impressive series. Beyond Closed Doors was published by Ormesby Publishing on 22nd June.

July 17, 2024 1

DIG TW0 GRAVES . . . Between the covers

I thoroughly enjoyed an earlier book in the series, and you can click the image below for the link.

I mention this, because Dig Two Graves begins literally as the final scene of The Temenos Remains fades out. We are in Norfolk and crime fiction buffs will know that this is no rural idyll; readers of Jim Kelly’s Peter Shaw series – and the excellent Ruth Galloway novels by Elly Griffiths – will be well aware that away from the “Chelsea-On-Sea” second homes of North Norfolk and the gentle downlands beyond Sandringham, Norwich and Great Yarmouth provide, to adapt the immortal words of Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, as wretched a hive of scum and villainy as one could wish to experience.

The “scum and villainy” in this case are provided by the brutal Lithuanian gangsters Constantin Gabrys and his psychopathic son Mica. As a local, Heather Peck will be only too cogniscant of the fact that Freedom of Movement in the dark days of EU membership brought tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans to the area to pick and process the food crops on which we all rely; like many others, she will also know that with the decent folk came gangsters, drug barons and people-traffickers, and this is the background to this novel.

DCI Greg Geldard and his team have found a Romanian woman – Madame Trieste, real name Adrianne Laurientiu – brutally murdered. The killers, in no particular order, have crucified the nail-bar owner, cut her throat, and made her swallow her own eyeballs The first police officer on the scene, DI Sarah Laurence has been abducted by the killers. The search for Sarah Laurence and the determination to bring her captors to justice drives the police on, and provides us with an excellent read.

I finished this excellent novel in just two sessions, and that should tell you that it is a genuine page-turner. My rather weather-beaten maxim for judging crime novels is in the shape of a question – do we care about the principal characters in the novel? Here, I can deliver a resounding ‘Yes!”. Geldard is thoroughly human and believable, and it doesn’t hurt that he his “significant other” is colleague DS Chris Matthews. Heather Peck doesn’t make a meal of this relationship, but she makes us aware that the police top brass are not entirely in favour. Peck resolves the problem, rather delightfully, in the last few paragraphs.

Dig Two Graves is a superior police procedural that rattles on at a breathtaking pace, and features genuinely vile criminals pursued by well-observed and authentic coppers. It was published by Ormesby Publishing on 28th June.

August 1, 2023 1

THE TEMENOS REMAINS . . . Between the covers

A temenos (Greek: τέμενος; plural: τεμένη, temenē) is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god, such as a sanctuary, holy grove, or holy precinct.

This is the fourth book in a series featuring Norfolk copper DCI Greg Geldard, but author Heather Peck (left) wastes no time in providing all the back-story we need. Geldard is divorced from his former wife, Isabelle, who is a professional singer. She has now remarried a celebrated orchestral conductor, with whom she has a child, while Geldard is in a relationship with one of his colleagues, DS Chris Mathews. When he gets an early morning ‘phone call from Isabelle saying she and her son have been threatened by a foreign criminal connected to one of Geldard’s previous cases, he is forced to stay at arm’s length, but is disturbed to hear from a colleague that Isabelle may be making the story up.

With this at the back of his mind, he has to focus on human remains found during an archaeological dig. Not unusual, you might think, but this skeleton has modern dental work and was buried with a 1911 silver thruppence in its mouth. After mining down into HOLMES, the national police database, Geldard’s team discover more cases that seem to be similar, and when part of the cliff near Hemsby collapses in a violent storm, another skeleton is revealed, along with its now obligatory coin. Meanwhile, in a series of short episodes which she calls ‘Entr’actes’, Peck introduces us to the man we presume is the killer, but these paragraphs are, at first, enigmatic, and only make sense towards the end of the book when the killer becomes a person of interest to the team.

Geldard’s relationship with Chris Mathews comes under a strain as she resents what she sees as his lingering affection for his former wife, and she is equally unhappy about his working relationship with DI Sarah Laurence. Do real-life coppers get into relationships with close colleagues? I don’t know, but other fictional social partnerships I recall were Tom Thorne and Helen Weeks in the Mark Billingham books, and Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks and his feisty on-off partner Annie Cabbot.

Eventually, the killer makes a big mistake and is pulled in, Geldard’s only problem being to convince the CPS that he is fit to stand trial and plead. There is to be no celebratory night in the pub, however. Heather Peck has kept the sub-plot featuring the foreign gangster gently simmering in the background, but right at the end she turns up the heat – and leaves us with a cliffhanger worthy of Scheherazade’s tales.

I loved the Norfolk setting of this story, and as a former resident, I can vouch for its authenticity. Greg Geldard is pleasantly ‘normal’ for a fictional senior detective, and Heather Peck relies on her mastery of modern police methods to hold our interest and keep the story ticking along. The Temenos Remains is published by Ormesby Publishing and is out now.

Heather Peck is certainly a busy woman. As well as writing novels, she has been a farmer, chaired an NHS Trust, has worked on animal welfare, sailed a boat on the Broads, volunteered in Citizens Advice and the Witness Service and vaccinated humans against Covid. To find out more, go to her website.

February 28, 2023 0