Historical set designer Remy Lane trades in Hollywood's phony film industry for the weathered ruins of England, unearthing stolen antiquities hidden beneath homicide.
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Historian Remy Lane ditches a dreary museum curator role to launch a novel career on boisterous movie sets. She's designing era-specific stages for period piece films. The work is intriguing but impermanent by nature, sprung within an artificial industry. Needing an enriching connection to the past, Remy travels abroad.
She explores the historical ruins scattered across England, captivated by their timeworn beauty. The expat is cradled by resplendent pastures and the Irish Sea when she settles in a remote coastal village. It is just her penchant for finding corpses that is worrisome. Remy discovers that crime swirls around the illegal trade of historical relics. Theft from archeological digs, museum pilferings, church robberies, and international smuggling rings bring precious cultural artifacts to collectors far from their origins. With a keen eye for historical details, Remy Lane strives to unravel such heritage crimes alongside Inspector Wm. Tremaine when murder accompanies antiquities in the black market trade on the shores of northern England. |
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The first novel, The Stars Prevail, pivots around the murder of an astronomer beneath the dark skies of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands. Amateur American sleuth Remy Lane, a vested detective inspector, and a cast of curious residents take us on a coastal tour—past the Solway Firth, along Hadrian’s Wall, and down the twisted lanes of their village—that somehow lands us among smugglers of illicit antiquities.
The second novel, The Tide Turns, expands upon the villagers' relationships when one of their own is murdered on a nearby island. The victim was an impoverished college student whose death is followed by a series of break-ins. What book did the killer seek in the library burglaries? Can rare, historical manuscripts be worth murder?
The third novel, The Sheltering Stones, links modern day crime to cultural antiquities collected by 19th century missionaries that were then housed in seminary museums. While the number of seminarians has dwindled over time, the value of the illicit antiquities has only increased. Are they now worth killing for?
The fourth novel, The Nighthawk's Nemesis, ties the murder of a retired ornithology professor to his discovery of rare gold coins minted during Rome's invasion of northern England in 50 AD. One of the gold staters is missing. So is his housekeeper. And who is lugging a metal detector across the nature reserve at night in search of a greater horde?