Just outside Bath, on Lansdown Hill, where an annual Civil War re-enactment takes place, two cavalry soldiers make a shocking discovery: a human femur. Could it belong to a long-dead soldier of the English Civil War? When forensic investigators uncover the rest of the skeleton—minus the skull—Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond learns that the remains belong not to a seventeenth-century soldier but to a young woman who
died only a decade or so ago.
Then one of the re-enactors, Rupert Hope, a lecturer at Bristol University, is found dead on the very same hill. Suddenly, Diamond has two possible murder investigations he’s keen on linking together. But with little to go on beyond nearly impossible to identify remains and a victim few people seem to know much about, can he prove they’re related? The only apparent link is Lansdown Hill itself.
As Diamond digs deeper, he continually comes up against his boss, Georgina, and the Lansdown Society—a small organization devoted to preserving and protecting the hill—which she happens to be a part of. What other secrets could Lansdown Hill have kept hidden?
