Just out from Book View Café: Chris Dolley’s An Unsafe Pair of Hands is a quirky murder mystery set in rural England charting the descent and rise of a detective on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Peter Shand is the ‘safe pair of hands’ – a high-flying police administrator seconded to a quiet rural CID team to gain the operational experience he needs for promotion. On his second day he’s thrust into a high-profile murder case. A woman’s body is discovered in an old stone circle – with another woman buried alive beneath her.

The pressure on Shand is enormous. The case is baffling. There appears to be no link between the two crimes. The media is clamouring for answers. And Shand’s convinced his wife is having an affair with someone called Gabriel. Which just happens to be the name of the two chief suspects. Both are womanisers, and both produce a mystery woman – who sounds suspiciously like Shand’s wife – as their alibi, The pressure builds. Shand can’t sleep, a local journalist is out to discredit him, his wife is about to be dragged into the case and then, goaded at a press conference about lack of progress, he invents a lead. And keeps on lying – to the press, his boss, his team – telling himself that he’ll solve the case before anyone finds out.

And then a second murder occurs. And had there been a third?

Shand begins to doubt his ability. He’s desperate, increasingly unpredictable, pursued by an amorous psychic, and unjustly gaining a reputation for arresting livestock.

What’s going to break first? The case, or Shand?

Find it at Book View Café.

Chris Dolley has been a computer consultant, a pioneer computer games designer, an amateur detective and once, as a teenager, freed a small country. Now he lives with his wife and a large collection of animals on a farm they renovated in the Normandy-Maine Regional Park.