ONE FOR SORROW

One for sorrow. Two for joy. Three for a girl. Four for a boy. Five for silver. Six for gold. Seven for a secret never to be told.

The magpie rhyme has seven lines. In the Forest of Dean, someone is working through them one by one.

DI Cassandra Thorne is called to a cathedral sculpture at first light. A man is suspended from it — alive, conscious, tattooed with the evidence of what he did to a child he was trusted to protect. No one reported the crime. No one saw it happen. And the man responsible has been left for the world to find.

It is only the first.

As the displays continue across Gloucestershire — each victim a person who escaped justice, each tattoo a record the courts refused to make — Thorne begins to understand that she is not hunting a criminal. She is hunting someone who has studied the law carefully enough to know exactly where it fails, and who has decided to fill the gap themselves.

The evidence is circumstantial. The methodology is extraordinary. And every person who has been taken describes a single voice, a single presence — someone who worked alone.

But as the count approaches its final line, something happens that Cassandra cannot explain. And the investigation she thought she understood begins to fracture around her.

Set against the ancient woodlands and quiet market towns of the Forest of Dean and the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, One for Sorrow is a forensic, atmospheric crime novel about obsession, grief, and the records that institutions refuse to keep — and what one person is prepared to do when the official record is not enough.