Tom Shearer Investigates

Thirty-five years ago, a boy died on the moor above Skelderby. A frightened young man went to prison for it. Everyone was satisfied. Everyone was wrong.

Acting DCI Tom Shearer didn't ask for a cold case unit, and he didn't ask for this one— a stroke, a divorce, and a quiet posting back to the county he grew up in were supposed to be the end of the story, not the start of a new one. But a single overlooked line in a thirty-five-year-old file is enough. Somebody knew more than they said. Somebody has been living comfortably on it ever since.

As Shearer pulls the thread, the case widens far past one dead teenager and one convicted man: a pathologist's report that doesn't add up, a witness statement that was never quite true, and a piece of land worth four million pounds that nobody thought to ask about. The people protecting the old lie are still close— some of them closer to Shearer than he'd like.

Hart Edge is a slow-burning, character-driven procedural for readers of Ann Cleeves and Peter Robinson— about the cost of a conviction nobody wanted to look at twice, and what it takes, decades later, for the truth to finally cost someone something.