Midnight on Hanging Bridge : A Tib Street Ballroom Mystery - Keira Willis

The ghosts of the past are telling tales, but someone in the present is determined to silence them, no matter who stands in their way. On a dark winter's night in 1967, seventeen-year-old Lily Woodhouse and young constable Davy Nash vanished without a trace. The case was never solved, and their names slipped quietly into the margins of history. Twenty years later, Detective Inspector Andrew Joyce has reached an uneasy peace with his new life in the Ballroom, but the city's cold-case unit, tucked away on Tib Street and slowly collapsing under the weight of time, feels more like a mausoleum than a police department these days. Investigations have slowed to little more than a whisper ever since Peggy Swan - their brilliant consultant with one foot in the world of the dead - walked away from the team months earlier, taking with her all opportunity for interesting cases, and leaving behind a silence that Joyce hasn't quite learned to live with. When Joyce stumbles across the Woodhouse-Nash file in the Ballroom's archive, he thinks things are finally on the up, but only hours later, his gruff and enigmatic boss, DCI Higson, disappears. Joyce still doesn't believe in coincidence, and as the past comes calling, he knows that he'll need to bring the entire team back together if they're to have any hope of tracking Higson down. As they're pulled deeper into a mystery that stretches across decades and into places best left undisturbed, it becomes chillingly clear: this case wasn't forgotten - it was buried. The Ballroom team is heading into darkness. The question isn't what they'll find there, but who they might lose along the way.