Consumed: A slick, smart, stylish – and shocking – thriller

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

On a remote farm, an elderly woman falls and is left helpless through the night. By morning, she is dead, her body consumed by her own pigs. The victim is Sophie Bertilak, a celebrated and fiercely private photographer whose work once exposed uncomfortable truths. Her most infamous image captured a missing girl who was never found. Inside the farmhouse, something is wrong. Every photograph has been carefully removed from its frame.

Forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen is brought in to examine the remains. What begins as a professional assignment quickly becomes an obsession. Drawn to Sophie’s life, her family and the crimes her photographs unearthed decades earlier, Cooper starts to see patterns others have missed.

As she follows a trail of secrets, deception and double lives, the past refuses to stay buried. The deeper Cooper digs, the more the case begins to mirror her own unraveling. This is a dark, unsettling crime novel about truth, memory and the cost of looking too closely.