The Burying Ground - David Mark

Opening up any David Mark thriller is a bit like opening up a mausoleum or rooting around in a cemetery. A fresh body might be closer to the surface, but as you dig a little deeper you find that it's only the latest in a long history of death. That’s perhaps not the nicest imagery you could come up with to describe a book, a little bit morbid and unpleasant, but if you’ve read any of this author’s books before you’ll know that far more grim events are described therein. In the case of The Burying Ground it's particularly appropriate, as that’s literally what happens when a storm destroys a mausoleum in a cemetery in the north of England close to Hadrian’s Wall. It uncovers not just a fresh corpse, but the bones of those long dead come tumbling out with it. Metaphorically speaking.

That grim discovery of an unexpectedly fresh dead body in an old mausoleum is revealed to Felicity Goose and Cordelia Hemlock, an usual pair of unlikely friends who had been visiting the cemetery when a violent storm struck the village of Gilsland in 1967. The weather conditions are so severe that they barely have time to register the image of a dead man in a blue suit with a canvas bag over his shoulder before they run for cover. A neighbour, Mr Fairfax, goes to check out what the ladies have seen, but doesn’t come back and his body is later found having crashed his car on the road out of the village. A local historian - some might say busybody - Fairfax has been interviewing local people for years for a book, and some suspect that he might have uncovered one buried secret too many.

David Mark weaves a little bit of small town gossip, scandal and indiscretion with his customary air of menace bordering on horror, but inevitably places his own distinct twist on small close-knit communities with secrets to hide. Gilsland, with its peculiar northern border geography, has a history built on layers of bones and secrets, the site of an ancient Roman fort, a proposed site for a rocket base. more significantly it was once home to a POW camp built by locals during the war, housing some of the most dangerous and fanatical Nazi prisoners. Some of the reformed prisoners have later settled in the region, which makes for interesting material for a local historian gathering information for a proposed book, but the documents behind left by Fairfax, discovered by Flick and Cordelia, hint at some darker history, as well as evidently, some more recent suspicious deaths.

Related from a distance of 30 years in testimonies by the two now much older women - each with their own troubled backgrounds and personal histories - there are evidently much more grim subjects and colourful characters for David Mark to detail and describe in his wonderful and poetically macabre way. It should be noted that there is another grim document uncovered from the past in the fact that The Burying Ground was first published in hardcover as in 2019 as The Mausoleum, but this and all of David Mark's body of work still remain fresh and ready for exhumation.