Some men are never brought to justice. Someone has stopped waiting.
Darren Coates is found dead on the bedroom floor of his rented flat, surrounded by all the signs of a routine overdose. With a history of addiction and a chaotic home, everyone is ready to accept the obvious explanation.
DCI Surinder Taws isn't convinced.
Fifty-two and newly transferred to the Aberdeenshire coast, Sindy has spent her career watching class, reputation and prejudice decide which victims are taken seriously. When she notices a puncture mark where no man would inject himself, she refuses to let Darren's death be quietly filed away.
Then another man dies.
The victims appear to have nothing in common. But as Sindy digs deeper into the close-knit coastal community, she uncovers connections everyone else has missed—connections rooted in fear, silence and the women left behind. When a third death follows, coincidence becomes impossible.
Someone knows exactly who these men were behind closed doors. Someone with access to their homes, knowledge of their secrets and a method designed to make murder look like misadventure.
As the investigation widens, an old Stonehaven legend keeps resurfacing: the Salt Wives, women said to have endured violent husbands until fate finally intervened. But the folklore offers more than a name. It forces Sindy to confront a question she has spent years avoiding: what happens when the law knows what a man is capable of and still does nothing?
As another life hangs in the balance, Sindy must stop a killer whose motives she understands more than she'd ever admit—and decide whether justice and the law are always the same thing.
Atmospheric, compassionate and morally complex, The Salt Wives is the second DCI Surinder Taws mystery—a character-led Scottish police procedural perfect for readers of Ann Cleeves, Elly Griffiths and crime fiction where the hardest questions aren't who killed, but why.
