Tuva has had her fair share of tragedy and is still reeling from the incident that almost killed her lover and put her in a coma. She now feels like she has little to lose, which is perhaps the reason she throws herself headlong into trying to solve another mystery, consequences be damned. A young woman has gone missing up near the mysterious Rose Farm, and no one is talking. It’s the sort of challenge Tuva cannot resist, even if it puts herself in danger. All writers have to do their best. If you write from a place of maximum empathy, and you really care about your writing, and your storytelling, then that’s all you can do. I always try to research as well as I can and to be as sensitive as I can to my characters, and to do them justice, whoever they are,” says Dean. “It’s my job to tell the story, and it’s other people’s job to critique it. And that’s fine.” What starts out as a missing person's case soon turns into something more sinister as a body is discovered. Suddenly the idyllic Rose Farm becomes a hotbed of resentment, and jealousy, as the disparity between the picture they present to the world and what actually happens there widens and is exposed. Dean is not deaf himself, and doesn’t understand why Tuva, who has now appeared in three crime novels, with more to follow, came to him in that way. “I wish I understood these things better. Maybe it’s a subconscious thing, and I had gleaned that I hadn’t seen many deaf characters,” he says. He still researches extensively into life with hearing loss, and says he was “worried and concerned” about how deaf readers would receive Tuva. When a deaf reader tells him his writing feels authentic, it means everything to him.

It's amazing to think that so many authors struggle to get published when this book is out there on shelves. I was going to just not write a review for this, because I know we're all just trying to get through life and I don't want to be mean to anyone just for the sake of it... But sometimes I think everyone is a bit too kind, because frankly this author would be better off doing something else with his life. Red Planet Pictures has optioned the rights to Will Dean’s Tuva Moodyson crime series and has brought Rose Ayling-Ellis on board to play the lead role. I enjoyed this, I enjoyed this quite a bit, and the ending caught me off guard, which is always good in a book like this.

The scene came to Dean in 2016, one night as he lay awake in bed. “I was in that strange time between wakefulness and sleep, and I saw very flat, featureless fields with a little tumbledown cottage. Then I saw a woman there,” he says. “She looked like she was living a fairly normal life there, but I knew she couldn’t leave. I wanted to understand why, and I wanted to understand her story. That night between midnight and 6am, the whole book came to me.”

Having grown up in the East Midlands, Dean depicts the huge skies and endless flats of the region through the eyes of Thanh Dao, to whom it is a “flatland hell”. “I do love it. I find it quite eerie and bleak, but it is quite beautiful,” he says. “I like bad weather and bleak landscapes. Where I am in the forest, the sun won’t rise above the treetops for the next two or three months. My friends freak out, and think that sounds awful, but I quite like it.” and then I nudge my ponytail and switch on my hearing aids but then we are confronted with a very different narrator.Another character…well two…who captured my interest were those creepy sisters and their trolls….WTAF!? I rarely get freaked out…but WOW – totally got under my skin ….even now I am getting shivers just thinking about them! I loved the descriptions of the Rose Farm and its occupants. The mysterious Abraham, which hasn’t been seen for years, the business like Therese, Abraham’s wife. With a wonderful main character, Tuva Moodyson, a deaf, bi-sexual reporter who has found herself relocated from London to Gavrik (Toytown) to be near her dying mother and working on a small local newspaper when a body is discovered deep in the forest in the middle of hunting season with the same signature as a serial killer from the 90’s. Determined to solve the crime herself, Tuva decides to investigate despite hating nature, elks, the forest, the dark, insects and small towns. I guessed the identity of the killer, because I kind of sensed the way Dean wrote about them, building them was a bit more meticulous than the other characters, but overall I really enjoyed this story. I just love that Will Dean can write a thriller, a PROPER whodunnit, a pacey & gory mystery...... that folds into its mix: pear flavoured wine gums, bouts of hayfever in MacDonalds, the rigmorale of changing out of layers of clothing & how a Hillux handles. Will Dean puts the REAL in surreal.