From Madness to Memory
(2025)(The ninth book in the Llangynog Murders series)
A novel by Janet Newton
‘I killed a man.’
This confession, blurted out to Bronwyn Cooper by a neighbor’s teenaged son, launches her husband DCI Will Cooper into an investigation that leads to more puzzles than solutions.
The boy has only fragmented, but vivid, memories of what happened. The body he describes in graphic detail cannot be found. The distinctive hammer that is the murder weapon has disappeared. No murder site can be identified, no witnesses step forward, and no CCTV cameras captured the crime. The woman who he insists witnessed the event seems not to exist.
Just as charges are dismissed for lack of evidence, Will stumbles upon a crime that bears startling resemblance to what the boy described, except that it occurred eleven years previously in a village on the other side of the country.
Ignoring his superiors’ direct instructions, Will pushes his assigned investigations onto his team as he yields to pressure from Bronwyn and devotes himself to the case. It’s not just the boy’s mental health on the line, he decides as he hurries to uncover evidence that points to a false confession by the man who says he committed the crime. If the wrong man is in prison, will the real killer emerge to silence the boy as his memories become clearer?
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Janet Newton's From Madness to Memory