The skin on his face and forearms was beginning to feel the first pleasant tightness of a sunburn. He paused, balancing his left arm on the handle of the upright sleán, and, with one rolled-up sleeve, mopped the sweat from his forehead, pushing away the damp, dark hair that stuck there. Brendan worked in his shirtsleeves his wool jacket, elbows permanently jointed from constant wearing, lay on the bank above his head. Good drying today, his father would have said. A steady westerly breeze swept over the bog, chasing high clouds across the watery blue of the sky, and teasing the moisture from the turf. This annual chore was the only way he'd ever known to stave off the bitter cold that crept under his door each November.Ĭhilblains were the farthest thing from Brendan's mind this unusually sun-drenched late-April morning. Though his father and grandfather and generations before had taken their turf from this same patch of bog, Brendan never thought of himself as carrying on an age-old tradition, any more than he considered the life cycles of all the ancient, primitive plants whose resting place he now disturbed.

He performed his task with a grace and facility that comes from repeating the same motion times without number. Had he known all that he'd turn up with the winter's fuel, perhaps he would have stopped that moment, climbed up onto the bank, and filled his shed with the uniform sods of extruded turf that a person could order nowadays by the lorry-load.īut Brendan continued, loosening each sopping black brick with the square-bladed turf spade, tossing it over the bank, where it landed with a plump slap. With a sodden rasp, Brendan McGann's turf spade sliced into the bank of earth below his feet. Could they, too, be hidden in the bog’s treacherous depths, only to be discovered centuries from now? Or did Hugh Osborne murder his family, as some villagers suspect? Bracklyn House, Osborne’s stately home, holds many secrets, and Nora and Cormac's inquiries threaten to expose them all. Two years earlier, Mina Osborne, the wife of a local landowner, went for a walk with her young son and vanished without a trace. The red-haired girl is not the only enigma in this remote corner of Galway. Who is she? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles.

Because the bog’s watery, acidic environment prevents decay, it’s difficult to tell how long the red-haired girl has been buried-two years, two centuries, or even much longer. When farmers cutting turf in an Irish peat bog make a grisly discovery-the perfectly preserved head of a young woman with long red hair-Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin must use cutting-edge techniques to preserve ancient evidence. The dazzling, award-winning debut in a series that delivers mystery, romance, suspense, and fascinating forensic detail.

Haunted Ground by Erin Hart