The Quiet Trade

Ross Strathdee, junior partner of Mintlaw's third-generation undertakers, has run to Spain. He left a confession in his sent items and a hole in the pre-paid funeral fund the size of three hundred thousand pounds. The paperwork is immaculate. The airport camera has him. The town, which has buried its dead through this family for ninety years, is quietly, bitterly satisfied.

Only his fiancee refuses the story, and she has three objections that will not sit down.

Detective Inspector Cormac Buchan has his retirement form in the sun visor of the Volvo, beside the leek card. He has no body, no scene, and a firm whose business is the orderly disposal of evidence. What he has instead is a crematorium, and a single question that nobody in the trade is ever asked, and one plain fact: the oven keeps better books than the banks do.

The fifth of the DI Cormac Buchan Investigations: a Scottish murder mystery about grief as a business, and a man who cannot bear to leave a file open.