As the sun sets into the sea over the pretty Cornish town of St Ives, a young woman, Freya Kempston, hasn’t returned home after a day out in the mall at St Austell. Panicking, her husband begs Detective Lauren Pengelly and her team to find her. Has Freya run out on her stable, loving marriage, or has something more sinister taken place?

Grainy security footage from the mall provides the first break in the case – capturing Freya talking intently with a well-known local mechanic on the day she disappeared. But when cornered, the mechanic denies even knowing her. It’s a puzzle that Lauren and her new partner, Detective Matt Price, can’t ignore. They scrutinise the video, hunting for missed clues…

Just as Lauren and Matt begin to untangle the man’s alibi, another woman vanishes after a late shift at the local supermarket. And then a third goes missing while at a nightclub in town. A shiver runs down Lauren’s spine when she realises they’re up against a serial predator, and he’s one step ahead of the police.

Digging deeper into the lives of the missing women, Lauren stumbles upon a series of concealed messages and covert meetings – a hidden life none of their families knew about. The three women were connected, bound by secrets that could hold the key to where they’re being held. The revelation sends Lauren and Matt on a heart-pounding race against time, knowing that with every ticking second there’s less chance of finding them alive…

‘Hidden Graves Of Saint Ives ‘ is the second book in Sally Rigby’s Cornwall Mystery series. I picked it up because the first book, ‘The Lost Girls Of Penzance‘ entertained me on a long drive and I was hoping the second book would do the same.

It turned out to be a strange reading experience. On the plus side, the story was entertaining, the plot hooked my curiosity making me eager for each new chapter, the characters were engaging and the dialogue worked. On the downside, the descriptions of facial expressions and charcters’ emotional reactions were clichéd and repetitive. Spotting how many times the phrase ‘A wave of emotion washed through ADD CHARACTER NAME” occurred in the text would have made a great drinking game. The descriptions of places and how the team got from one location to another were detailed but bland – more on the lines of stage directions than atmospheric prose.

To me, this read like the script of a TV episode turned into a novel by adding clumsy boileplage phrases to the dialogue.

It’s a mark of how good the story was that, despite the sometimes eye-rollingly poor quality of the prose, I had no desire to set the book aside.

I’ll even be listening to the next book in the series. ‘Murder At Land’s End‘.