The Murder Bird - Tapa dura

At the heart of every murder, there's a child crying...Kirsten Waller, the acclaimed and well-known poet, is found dead in the bath in her remote cottage in Cornwall. The police claim it is suicide, but her daughter Sam refuses to believe her mother would take her own life and sets out to prove it was murder. At the time of Kirsten's death, she was working on her new masterpiece - a poem called 'The Murder Bird'. Only a few people knew of its existence and what it was about. But now the poem is missing together with her journal. It is this poem, which holds the key to the mystery and what really happened in the final minutes of Kirsten's life, and Sam desperately needs to find it. She's convinced Kirsten's ex-husband, Raph Howes, knows more than he admits. He certainly knew about the poem. As Sam determines to uncover the secrets around her mother's violent death, and risks her own life to get to the truth, she discovers much more than she ever expected.

Joanna Hines was born in London. She read history at Somerville College, Oxford, then studied at the LSE. She divides her time between London and Cornwall, and is the author of, among others, IMPROVISING CARLA and SURFACE TENSION.