When the Dead Cry Out

A Novel

From a former Fleet Street journalist and an accomplished British suspense writer comes a complex puzzle wrapped in a plot that could almost be ripped from contemporary U.S. headlines. Imagine what would happen if a vanished woman's body lay underwater for almost three decades, the police unable to charge her guilty-as-sin husband until her remains are finally discovered by pure chance...

27 years ago, Clara Marshall and her two young children vanished without a trace. In the face of intense scrutiny, her estranged husband claimed she was having an affair and had left him, taking the children and destroying the family forever. Though police and the community remain suspicious, no evidence ever surfaces to prove he's lying, and his wife and children are never found—alive or dead. Until now, that is—when some unidentified skeletal remains are discovered wrapped in a tarp on the bottom of the ocean, reporter John Kelly and Detective Inspector Karen Meadows, each intimately connected to the events of so long ago, suspect that the final resting place of Clara Marshall has finally been found. But many questions are left to be answered—just what happened to the children?—and the decades-old evidence trail is growing colder by the minute.

Overflowing with page-turning suspense and an engrossing plot inspired by a terrifying true story, When the Dead Cry Out is the triumphant American debut of talented crime writer Hilary Bonner.