The Forgotten Corpse

When a violent Mediterranean storm tears apart the pool terrace of his Costa Blanca villa, retired British engineer David Darnell expects nothing more than a battle with his insurance company. What he uncovers in the rubble, buried deep beneath the foundations, stops him cold.

The local police are quick to offer an explanation. So is the town. So is almost everyone David speaks to. The answers come a little too easily, and the people giving them are a little too keen for him to move on.

Pushed by a journalist who has been following this story far longer than David has, and increasingly unable to ignore what the storm has revealed, he begins to pull at threads that were sewn tight thirty years ago. What unravels implicates not just one person, but an entire community — its officials, its old money, its long-cultivated habit of looking the other way.

Because in Albatera, a sun-bleached town in the hills above the Costa Blanca, the past has always been nobody's business. The secrets run deep, the loyalties run deeper, and someone has already proved once that they are willing to go to any lengths to keep things that way.

David Darnell is not a detective. He is not a hero. He is a practical man who made the mistake of looking too closely at something he was supposed to leave alone, and now he cannot look away.

The Forgotten Corpse is an atmospheric crime thriller set among the whitewashed villas, dusty town squares and long shadows of Spain's Costa Blanca. Warm on the surface. Dark underneath. And impossible to put down.